Catherine, thank you for joining us. Thank you. And it's also super interesting that you made the time because you have a ten- week- old baby at home. I do yeah. What's that like to be one of the rare women and the mining industry, young, leading the organization and a ten- month- old baby? Ten week old baby. Ten weeks. Ten weeks. Yes is stressful. No It's been quite entertaining actually. Only in so far as the chaps I work with have absolutely no experience with dealing with the issues associated with. Being pregnant and growing in size and not knowing whether to comment on this or not. [ LAUGH ] And maternity leave and not, you know, because I've got to the point where I'm management, I've not just switched off, you know, I've not disappeared, but at the same time I'm not going into the office every day. I've just had a baby so balancing that now luckily, I had my first child. When I just joined Barrett and I had a sort of non role I describe it so there was some experience of how I was gonna stay attached stay in touch. But yes the last few weeks have been entertaining only and so far as these chaps with desperately trying very hard to be helpful, Accommodating, but with no experience, keep asking me whether they're doing a good job. [ LAUGH ] Don't you like it when men do that, that's genius. But you've also taken a different trajectory of joining the mining industry. Because you're only 38, but you are chief operating officer, you had the role of CFO And the journey has been very different to many of the men in your organization. How did you skip the line? Well, I used my brain [ LAUGH ] was so I was a geologist originally. So I studied natural scientists at Cambridge specialized in geology, did a mining finance masters thinking I'd go into sort of evaluations in the mining industry. A combination of not wanting to go out to the middle of nowhere and do my three years in the field in order to get back to the office, which was the normal route. As well as being the bottom of the last commodity cycle, so it was just after the dot- com bubble, 2002, 2003. I went to work for Merrill Lynch instead of going to work for [ UNKNOWN ], which were my two options. And so luckily, Over the next decade, we had this huge commodities boom I was a portfolio manager ended up being co managed with the largest mining fund in the world. Got me huge amounts profile, got me a lot of experience very quickly. Which then meant i could effectively as you say leapfrog and get myself into a position where my background and my expertise is around strategy, around finance, around investors. It's a very different angle To the typical mining root and at the time the new chairman was looking for new blood, looking to change the behavior of mining and that's a lot of what we're going to talk about, actually trying to change the way the mining industry behaves. And I suppose to some extent epitomize that having me. Up there. Not only do I think differently, I look differently, I sound different. It just, created an opportunity that for me was too good to pass up. To talk us through the strategy because that's quite important when we look at gold, it's always been, The standard. How important in your eyes, [ UNKNOWN ] you look at technology and all of the changes and geopolitics and tensions, how important has gold become in this time? Is it relevant? Is it coming back? Where is it at? What's fascinating gold, everyone always says it's a barbarous relic. In fact, that's kings who said it was a barbarous relic. When was that 100 years ago, if not more, that it's somehow going to lose its, glitter blisters, Shakespeare would say, the thing is It always comes back to being that store of value. Now I brought a prop with me She's got a prop. To illustrate the point, which is, here is a note from a country. It's the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and it's a $ 100 trillion note And what this illustrates is just the danger of feared currency, of paper money. And the danger of people trying to manipulate currencies in order to get themselves out of the problems that they face. Now, today and over the last decade we've seen a huge amount of that, quantitative easing, debt crises, we've seen interest rates being cut. This manipulation of currencies in order to solve human problems. The thing about gold is the only way you can get more gold is to dig it up. So on the whole gold supply increases by no more than 2 % per annum. And what that does is it means its value is very tangible. And literally it's tangible in that to hold a bar of gold you feel the weight of it. And so for centuries for thousands of years That has had value and and we can see today with gold having rallied very rapidly from 1200 to 1500. Whether it's trade wars with China, whether it's you know, the drones attacking a Saudi oil refinery whether it's Currency manipulation and in particular the interest rate rises or interest rate cuts. So now we're looking at a weaker economy and interest rates cuts in the US. What people do is go to safe havens and gold is the epitome of safe haven. And so yes, this keeps me sane. So whenever someone tells me that cryptocurrencies are gonna take the place of gold, I look at this And I realized that I would still rather have my gold sovereigns hidden away, that I can pass on to next generations that a mobile that can come with me wherever I go, that will be forever fungible into any currency than ever trust paper. If anyone wants to see what 100 trillion dollars looks like in Zimbabwe, please do Couch Catherine as she's leaving. And here it comes the question about technology, then because it's gold is gold at the end of the day it comes down to mining. It comes down to human beings in those mines and technologies playing that big part. How does AI? How does digitalization change The very waggled functions for you as a company as a product and how does it impact the workforce? How are you implementing it at this point? Well the pain thing really is around what there are three areas that technology is really gonna help Gold money in particular, but mining in general. So the first thing as a commodity business, you can't really change your revenue line. I speak as a former CFO so you don't have the flexibility that a lot of other companies have, which is you evolve or change your revenue line to be able to increase profits. So everything is always around costs. Or it's around producing more. And so technology and AI in particular provide us the opportunity to prevent the margin erosion that we're currently seeing. So we're seeing taxes increase. We're seeing the environmental cost, the social cost of mining going up. We're seeing huge pressures on the money exchange in general. So when you look at the opportunity of automation taking people out. And when you look at the opportunities of ALI to stop [ UNKNOWN ] to actually be able to react in milliseconds rather than days to things. And approve efficiency's. They're always protecting your margin over time. The second thing, which I think is most important is around the changing nature of the workforce. One is that the safety element of mining it's a dangerous job mining, unfortunately particularly when you are Underground and so by being able to remove people from that danger, particularly the face of underground where you've got seismic activity you have the potential for rock for instance. But also tracks moving around. We had a terrible terrible accident the other day with a bus. Having an accident on the road, just tracking people to work. You're always going to be at risk, and so by automating, what you do, is remove some of that. And the workforce also is changing. So if I look at the demographic in Nevada, which is under my domain, The average age is 47. So 50 % of your working population is over 47 an dthe challenge we've got over the next 20 years is they are all gonna be retiring. And what we don't have is a huge amount of young blood coming into the industry. And we have to attract that young blood. We have to make mining somewhere they want to go to, somewhere cutting edge, somewhere that's going to be full of opportunity rather than people fearing that it's the same old drudgery that job cuts whenever the commodity price goes down. How do you do that with Automation, because there in lies the fear that you wouldn't have the talent that wants to do the job. But then with technology in the eye, you have sexier fields to go into as competitors. People would rather work at an electric car company, than be Dealing with mining perhaps. How do you win that battle when you are implementing the technology? Well it's a peer in fact. >. Yeah .>> Because the application of those techologies to miners is just important. Effectively what we're changing is, we're taking the truck drivers and turning them to data analysists We're taking the mining engineers and making them AI specialists. And it's changing the nature of our business. And so, that's also the big pressure In terms of communicating to communities and to governments. It's not about taking jobs away, it's about changing the nature of the jobs and making them much more transferable skills. So the biggest challenge we have is in Northern Nevada, you're in Elko, you've got a small population. You want to be able to offer them opportunities that means they don't have to leave that town. And if you can provide them with those kind of hi- tech skills in the local college, [ UNKNOWN ] in college, well then the whole approach to the business and to the industry is going to change. And so yes, for us, it is very much taking What we're supposed to Old World skills and retraining or bringing in new blood and turn them into the electric car company in the future. In fact, Tesla is based now in northern Nevada too. So we're continuing to purchase a change in Questions from everyone in the room. That's one of the back [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Thank you so much Scotty Greenwood, Canadian American Business Council. The immediate past chair of our board Silla board member is Christina Erling from Barrick. So wonderful company, Great Investor in Public policy Kennedy USA but I just texted Christina because we have a board meeting here in Toronto tomorrow. And I said are you here, your COO is speaking at this Fortune conference and she said no she's not. She's on maternity leave. [ LAUGH ] I said she's here. And we agreed how kick ****. So anyway, Christina sends her best. I should have told Christina I was here, yes. Thank you. And she's doing a great job by the way. She is. Commutes to [ UNKNOWN ] to Washington D. C. which is a heck of a commute. But anyway thank you. And I think the other thing that highlights is the importance of building a team around you so Christina's government relations for North America but US and Canada and so my ability to step away I have no qualms doing that because I've got that team around me to do it, and that is, I think, the most important thing around, particularly in the mIning industry, is creating that support network that means that you don't feel guilty, you don't feel bad for not being there all the time. And it provides people opportunity as well. Any other questions in [ UNKNOWN ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Hi Jennifer Flannigan from actual. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to any initiatives that Barrack is doing to invest in that workforce of the future. So you talked about reskilling but are you doing any. Long term planing to bolster that work force. Yeah, so great base in college, the reason I mentioned them which is the sort of local tertuary college in [ UNKNOWN ]. We've partnered with them effectively to create the core skills that we're looking for in the future. So we've got it both on the electrician side of it for manual skills but also data analytic skills to bring it in locally, and then what we're doing is we've tried both successfully and unsuccessfully the last two or three years was partnering with smaller Companies. So, one is automation. Driverless trucks in Nevada. We couldn't get any of the big manufacturers, Caterpillar, Sandvig, to engage. And, so what we've done is, we've partnered with some smaller outfits. Really to try and customize it to apply to the technology that we have on site, rather than having to buy brand new. So those are the two areas in particular. And then the final thing is we're actually introducing a graduate scheme. We've never really had a proper graduate scheme. Because of this boom- bust nature of mining industry, you hire when you can, and you let people go when you can't. And it's that lack of consistency, that lack of longevity, that I think has really held the mining industry back over the years. It would be great if we had time to talk more about the responsible mining agreement that you have been part of. But we Have pretty much run out of time but we would probably get into it if you can grab it on the way out as she runs back to her 10 we go baby. So thank you very much [ UNKNOWN ] for joining us, and it's been great having you [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Preparing Mining for a High Tech Future

Finance

Barrick Gold’s Catherine Raw on how her company is is ready for disruption
