JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Surface gold mining company DRDGold on Wednesday announced its fifteenth consecutive financial year of dividend paying.

For the year ended June 30, the Johannesburg- and New York-listed company, headed by CEO Niël Pretorius, declared a final dividend of 40c a share, totaling a distribution of 60c a share for the 12 months.

DRDGold generated R871.6-million in free cash flow for the year, supported by a gold price off recent highs but still robust.

In a release to Mining Weekly, Pretorius portrays the financial year for the company, South Africa and the world as being characterised by a ‘litany’ of challenges less to do with Covid and more to do, in South Africa, with:

• infrastructure theft and decay;
• lack of deployment of resources by those responsible for the protection of lives and property;
• an angry society, community violence and violent crime;
• labour unrest;
• deteriorating service delivery; and
• the soaring cost of basics required by business and communities.

On a global scale, Pretorius cites the challenges posed by climate change and war. Against that background, DRDGOLD had held its own.

“One of the core principles that informs our strategic thinking is that, to thrive well, you need to survive well.

“In practice this means that, for many years, we have deliberately invested in capital and developing a system to increase business resilience and robustness. This approach has carried us through,” said Pretorius.

Looking ahead, DRDGold remained committed to investing in the sustainability and growth of its business, growing capital investment from R584.1-million to R700-million in the financial year, now under way.

Although the latest Fraser Institute report flags South Africa as the fourth-worst mining jurisdiction out of 185 surveyed internationally, this did not mean that it was impossible to thrive in this jurisdiction – “it simply means that the standard of political governance is not such that it enables and promotes business”.