Hello, everyone. I'm Belinda Ford from BHP Communications, and I'm joined today by our CEO Brandon Craig and our CFO Vandita Pant. And we're going to talk today about the recent results that BHP just released. Welcome Brandon and Vandita, thank you.
First of all though, before we get to the results, there was a fatal incident at BMA's Peak Downs mine in Queensland. Brandon, do you want to address that first before we get into results?
Yes I do. I started in this role with the ambition to try and work through my entire tenure without there being a fatality at BHP. I have absolute conviction that we can be a business that is fatal free. And it's tragic when people inside our industry are fatally injured. And within the first month of starting, we had this event and of course, I made it a priority to try and get up to Peak Downs to meet with the team so that I could really understand what had happened. And I think there's clearly some learnings for us in BHP in terms of how we need to respond to this as a business. We've made really, really strong progress at eliminating fatalities from this business. So, when they do come, it's important that we really learn from them.
I'll turn now to the results for the year, which were a strong set of results financially for BHP. Perhaps you could step us through some of the key numbers, Brandon and Vandita. If there's some that you'd like to talk to there, that'd be great.
Well the financial results are clearly very, very strong, but I think what really stands out for me is just the strong underlying performance from the business. And year-on-year, this is a business that just continues to produce record production numbers. You can see that in our iron ore business in Western Australia, which produced another record, and it seems to be a year-on-year process that iron ore does records. And I think very pleasingly, Escondida performed incredibly well. And what you see in our business in BHP is if the two big assets, which is our iron ore business and Escondida in Chile, when those two assets perform, the overall business performs, and both of them had a very, very strong year. And you put that on the back of what has been really resilient iron ore prices and very strong copper prices, has produced a really, really exceptional result.
Yeah. Maybe I would add a few things that this is the first year that copper has contributed more than 50% to our EBITDA, to our earnings, and we are the largest copper producer. And we reiterated that position this year, Brandon, with 2 million tonnes of copper produced across our copper assets. Really strong balance sheet with all that cash coming through with the very high prices in copper as well as in iron ore, but equally because of our reliable performance that Brandon was just talking about. Really strong balance sheet, we end the year with less than $9 billion of net debt, and that performance and that balance sheet strength, along with some of the capital unlocks we did during the year of more than 4 billion through an Antamina streaming deal. We have managed to give our highest dividend for the year in four years to our shareholders, which is fantastic. $8.7 billion of dividend for FY26. And I think the operating system has played an essential role in that.
And again, you can see that reflected in our results. And Vandita set out some of the numbers. But across the business, I think we feel quite proud of what we've been able to deliver this last year.
Thanks, Brandon. I know people will be curious what your reflections are after your first 50 days in the role. So what are you seeing as you look across BHP and what are your priorities?
Well, it feels a little bit more than 50 days. This process actually started quite some time ago. The Board ran a very thorough process for the election of the CEO, and the one benefit you get from that is you effectively have to put together a plan for what you want to do with the company. So you get to revisit the strategy, revisit the priorities, have a very close look at everything from where we want to allocate capital, the commodities we want to be in. And because of all of that, you start with a very clear idea of what it is you want to do. And then in addition to that, we also made sure we did a very good handover process. So Mike and I spent nearly eight weeks on the road continuously traveling around the world, connecting with all the critical relationships we have in this business. And there are many across government, across investment banks, across our customers. We managed to see all of them and hand over those relationships. And I think overall that was incredibly helpful because it allowed me on the 1st of July to actually have a clear plan of where I would like to take the company, a clear set of relationships that I'd been connected to because of Mike and the way we manage the handover, which has really allowed me to start with a lot of momentum in BHP.
But importantly, I do want to stress, this is a case of we—it's the Executive Leadership Team. And we have an incredible team in BHP with Vandita and many others on the ELT. And they have been fantastic, they've got behind the agenda we've set out. I think we're making really good momentum and that agenda sets out a couple of priorities. The first is we really want to strengthen our foundations across safety, social value and all the critical relationships we have in the business. We want to really push the boundaries on productivity. So we have very high aspirations for the further potential that exists in the business. And we want to pursue that through our Operating System, and also how we better leverage technology in BHP. And the more we look around us, the more we can see there are so many opportunities for us to do that. And the third is really just how we think about growth. We think we're in the right commodities at the moment. I think you can see some of that in the results that have just been released. And on the back of that, if we can grow that portfolio further, in what I would describe as a programmatic sense that will allow us to add early stage options, exploration opportunities and a range of other organic growth options, across commodities we have high conviction in, which is potash and copper and some smaller projects in iron ore. You put all of that together. I think we have a very good agenda going forward that will unlock a lot more value for shareholders. So we're quite excited by that.
What do we expect to see in copper in terms of growth for BHP? Can you give us a little bit of a flavour, Brandon, where that growth is coming from in the next decade?
Well obviously as BHP, we're really excited about our future in copper, and we have a number of very significant growth projects that we're working on. Some of them are directly BHP operated projects and others are joint ventures and partnerships that we have with others. But if I go through them quickly, we are expanding Escondida. Escondida is already the world's largest copper mine, but it's also going through a period of grade decline, and we really want to reinvest into that business with a new concentrator that will allow us to lift up production at that facility. Sticking with South America, in Argentina, we also have a joint venture with Lundin Mining, and we're developing what I think is an incredibly exciting project in Argentina, that project is called Vicuna. It's going to be a multi-stage project that we invest in. We're hoping to get to a potential final investment decision as early as the end of this calendar year. But it stands to be, a top five copper producer and a top five gold producer simultaneously once fully ramped up. So for that project in particular, we're really, really excited and we've made significant progress with all of the engineering, the approvals and the relationship we have with our counterparty in Lundin is very strong. Then, of course, right here in Australia we have the Copper South Australia smelter refinery expansion. And that has the potential, if we expanded to full capacity, to get all the way to a million tonnes of copper equivalent production, and then we have further options that are longer dated, for example, Resolution in Arizona, in the US. And so you put all of that together. This is a business that can go from 1.4 million tonnes of attributable copper today to a business that can get to 2 million tonnes and beyond into the future. And considering 1.4 is already the world's largest copper producer, it gives you a sense of the scale of what we're currently working on.
Vandita, can I ask you about how you think about funding that growth? I know that's a question for our shareholders around will our, are we going to see a step up in capital expenditure. How should our investors think about it?
So we think about this a lot. We have some fantastic, attractive high quality growth options for copper. And we are growing in iron ore, we will have potash come in for production next year. And there is growth in BMA from just getting the latent capacity going. All that needs to be funded, as you said. And the way I think about this is starting with very strong balance sheet. And we are ending the year with very strong balance sheet, which is actually below our target net debt range at $9 billion. The second thing to think of is that our portfolio, as Brandon just said, is a diversified portfolio by design. And the important thing with that is that we get not only large but very resilient cash flows, whatever the commodity prices, our portfolio will be able to fund all that growth. In fact, our copper CapEx growth portfolio in Chile, in Copper South Australia, in Vicuna in Argentina, and the long-term optionality in the US with Resolution, all that can be self-funded from copper's own generated cash flows, which is not what many companies can do. With very strong balance sheet already continuing, and of course, a business which continues to perform very well, which has huge generation of capital cash flows and as Brandon was saying, has huge momentum to keep going to the next level as well.
Thanks, Vandita. And our shareholders always ask us about our portfolio mix and coming in as our new CEO, Brandon, do you like the portfolio? Are the things that you want to add? How do you think about the portfolio?
