How DRD GOLD Aims To Create Value For The Long Term. DRDGOLD Limited is a South African gold producer and a world leader in the recovery of the metal from the retreatment of surface tailings. DRDGOLD has a network of assets that is unrivalled in South Africa and, with its consolidated businesses operating as a single entity, is focused on optimising these assets in order to increase gold production.
Founded in 1895 alongside other mining giants which have come and gone, DRDGOLD remains the oldest, continuously listed company on the JSE. This 120 year old mining business is staying the course – developing and refining its strategy and deploying its resources – to mine not only profitably, but also optimally – ensuring that the business remains sustainable well into the 21st century. Achieving this required bold decisions, such as its decision to dispose of its last underground assets, thereby allowing the company to focus on surface gold reclamation.
The company conducts its business to be profitable, but more importantly, to create value in the longer-term. It aims to add economic value over a sustained period, rather than a hit-and-run approach, which could potentially enrich fewer people for a shorter period. It seeks to achieve this by using integrated thinking in its decisions to deploy resources and capital. The company actively seeks synergies between the financial, human, social, natural and manufactured aspects of its business as it creates value for all its stakeholders in the short-, medium-, and longer-term.
The company has an initiative that has its origins in DRDGOLD’s well-established Broad-based Livelihoods (BBL) Programme. Managed by Umsizi for DRDGOLD, this programme helps thousands of vulnerable people living within DRDGOLD’s operating footprints to use land and immediate opportunities available to them – sometimes just their household yards – to grow healthy food, to generate income, to undertake productive self-employment activities and to run businesses.
At the end of the Financial Year of 2018, DRDGOLD provided jobs for 2 304 people, including 878 permanent employees. The remaining 1 426 people worked for the specialist service providers engaged by the company to provide the expertise required for tailings reclamation and tailings dam management. The company also produced 150 423oz of gold, generated R2 490.4 million in revenue, spent R1 452.7 million on capital projects (property, plant, equipment, surface) and 191ha of rehabilitated land were lodged for clearance for redevelopment. Mineral Resources of 7.3Moz and Mineral Reserves of 3.3Moz were declared.
