During the period, we made progress in our divestment strategy by signing sale agreements for AECI Much Asphalt and AECI Animal Health, two of the six targeted divestments. This being a crucial step in our commitment to streamline our portfolio and focus on our core business. Post year end, the disposal of AECI Much Asphalt was successfully completed and the AECI Animal Health disposal process continues. In April 2025, we entered into a MOA to dispose of our Public Water business. The subdued mergers and acquisitions environment experienced this year impacted our divestment process. We, however, remain committed to a disciplined approach, prioritising long-term value creation as we navigate the divestment process under these conditions.

Functional excellence

The TMO identified 600 initiatives that would make up our R2.4 billion target by 2026. It engaged with the business and worked with initiative owners to drive the implementation of, circa, 200 initiatives during 2024. Our functional excellence workstreams included commercial excellence, growth projects, procurement and our physical supply chain. We achieved commercial excellence by focusing on the basics, including the review of customer/product profitability and looking at cross selling opportunities between AECI Mining and AECI Chemicals. Using the techniques developed with the support of our consultants we worked on how to set pricing depending on the market, the product and the customer.

We made good progress with our growth projects by expanding our value proposition, focusing on new geographies, new customers and new products. To optimise our physical supply chain we focused on optimising our route planning and minimising product handling. In procurement we focused on optimising, collaborating, consolidating our spend and engaging with our suppliers. The centralising of procurement has resulted in improved pricing and review of supplier terms.

Manufacturing excellence

We reviewed our asset base for rightsizing and consolidation opportunities, which resulted in the optimisation and repurposing of our current assets.

An important focus for our mining business in 2024, was completing delayed statutory shutdowns in both the chemical and mining businesses in the first half of the year. We have seen good improvements in overall equipment efficiency since the shutdowns.

We previously committed to increasing our spend on maintenance to ensure a healthy asset base in our core businesses. This investment has seen our plant availability increase.

In response to changing market demand, one of our key projects in 2024 was the rightsizing of our sulphuric acid plant in Durban. The AECI team developed an innovative engineering solution to adapt the plant, which was previously designed to produce volumes exceeding current market requirements. As part of our capability-building efforts, the team also successfully optimised the output of a high-margin downstream product by over 40%, enabling our marketing team to access greater volumes of this higher-value product. At our Modderfontein complex, we have invested in new, greener technology that has increased nitric acid production capacity by 5%.

To reduce our reliance on the importation of our strategic raw material quantities for our mining surfactant business, we were able to optimise some of our reactors. As a result, we have been able to replace over 50% of previously imported raw materials with locally produced materials and consequently reduced our exposure to shipping risks and related costs.

We have repositioned our oleo chemicals business to support the growth in mining chemicals and have already started exporting product from our Jacobs plant.

Creating resilience

During 2024 we commissioned three of our solar plants, giving us in excess of six megawatts of electricity. While these plants only provide 5% of our energy consumption, they displace 5% of our previous use of energy produced from the burning of fossil fuels. We invested R140 million in these plants, however, the return on our investment is good as we will be saving R30 million annually on energy costs.

While our strategic ambition is to attain a global market position in Mining of #3 by 2030, the Group has adopted a disciplined and phased approach to international growth. In 2024, the focus was on stabilising legacy international operations and resolving structural inefficiencies that stemmed from earlier expansion efforts. This groundwork sets the stage for accelerated, targeted international expansion from 2025 onward. Key growth corridors include Mining Chemicals on the African continent and Mining Explosives in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Australia, where we are developing scalable platforms through new partnerships, talent deployment and customer-driven expansion models.