Exxaro Resources, South Africa’s black empowered diversified minerals and energy solutions business released its full-year financial results for the year ended 31 December 2024. Despite the challenging operational landscape and market conditions, the performance demonstrates resilience in a dynamic industry, reinforcing commitment to the group’s strategic objectives as well as value creation for stakeholders. Some of the highlights include 28 consecutive months without work related fatalities and improving lost time injury frequency rate. This demonstrates Exxaro’s effective safety strategy and dedication of all employees to towards reaching our goal of Zero-Harm.
Our environmental stewardship highlights our focus on responsible business practices focusing on decarbonisation, air quality, rehabilitation programmes, biodiversity management, water, energy, and waste management. Our efforts are aimed at minimising business impact on the environment. As such, we recorded zero level 2 and 3 environmental incidents during 2024.
Additionally, the development of our Decarbonisation Roadmap has been achieved. This is critical for the business as it maps out our short, medium, and long-term decarbonisation approaches, essential towards achieving our objective of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050.
Riaan Koppesschar, Exxaro’s Acting CEO and Finance Director said, “at the heart of everything we do is our people. We prioritise health, safety and the environment always, ensuring that all our employees return to their families safely, every day. Through incredible safety leadership, communication, consequence management, training, and risk management, our goal of Zero-Harm remains attainable.”
Our lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) is also moving in the right direction and has improved to 0.06 in the 2024 financial year from 0.07 in 2023. Furthermore, for the reporting period, we invested R2.1 billion towards social impact programmes and initiatives compared to R1.9 billion spent in the 2023 financial year. This supported our efforts in enterprise supplier development, education, infrastructure development and other socio-economic activities aimed at supporting our communities. We commit to remaining steadfast in our dedication of ploughing back and contributing meaningfully towards the upliftment of host communities and surrounding areas.
Through our Enterprise Supplier and Development (ESD) programme, we supported 562 black Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises through local procurement, skills development, funding opportunities, business incubation initiatives and access to market interventions.
We are making a meaningful impact in our host communities by investing in education. We do not only focus on children and the learning environment, but we also build capacity by providing the necessary professional training to teachers and practitioners, ensuring that they have all the tools they need to provide quality education to our children. In 2024 our early childhood development programmes benefited more than 2 700 children, more than 40 registered early childhood development centers, and over 180 teachers through professional training. We also successfully connected 27 schools in Mpumalanga and Limpopo with wi-fi networks and provided information and communications technology labs to 20 schools.
In January 2025, Exxaro handed over the newly built Martina Kekana school hall, a block of four classrooms and associated external works upgrades to Nelsonskop Primary school in Lephalale, benefiting more than 1 580 children and teachers. At a total project cost of over R20 million, the project boosted local company participation which included one black female owned principal contractor, six sub-contractors, 15 suppliers and 11 service providers, creating 48 temporary jobs, which included on-the-job skills training to TVET college students.
We are reimagining the sustainability of our communities, ensuring that they continue to thrive beyond the life of mine by creating post-mining economies. We do this through our mineral succession programme, which grants emerging farmers access to rehabilitated or surplus mining land, for agricultural and commercial ventures.
At year end, our mineral succession programme had 10 609 hectares of land under management and provided more than R63 million in funding towards 36 projects across six provinces in South Africa. The projects were made up of 662 farmers, 53% of which were women and 24% were youth. Despite weather related challenges, the farmers managed to harvest over 6 000 tonnes of produce.
“We will continue to ensure that the positive legacy of Exxaro endures by supporting our communities and enabling them to thrive, for generations to come. We will continue to prioritise social investments and supplier development programs that prioritise partnership that create job opportunities and contribute to the livelihoods of our stakeholders across our value chains and especially in our host communities. We are proud of how our business units continue to push boundaries to ensure social impact is integral in our business operations as part of our commitment to long-term stakeholder value creation beyond the life of mines.” concludes Koppeschaar.