Results of Annual General Meeting
Gold Fields Limited
Incorporated in the Republic of South Africa
(Registration Number 1968/004880/06)
JSE, NYSE, DIFX Share Code: GFI
ISIN: ZAE000018123
("Gold Fields" or “the Company”)
RESULTS OF ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF GOLD FIELDS LIMITED HELD ON 6 MAY 2021
Shareholders are advised that at the virtual Annual General Meeting of Gold
Fields Limited held on Thursday, 6 May 2021, all the ordinary and special
resolutions, as well as the advisory endorsements of the company’s remuneration
policy and remuneration implementation policy, as set out in the notice of the
Annual General Meeting dispatched to shareholders on 31 March 2021 were passed,
on a poll, by the requisite majorities.
Details of the results of the voting are as follows:
Total issued share capital: 887 564 061
Total number of shares present / represented
including proxies at the meeting: 670 484 866
being 75.54% of the total votable shares
Ordinary resolutions Number of Percentage Percentage Percentage Percentage
shares of shares for against abstained
voted voted
1: Appointment of PwC as 669,493,725 75.43% 99.99% 0.01% 0.11%
external auditors
2.1: Election of director - CI 669,620,164 75.44% 99.98% 0.02% 0.10%
Griffith
2.2: Election of director - PG 669,622,767 75.45% 99.30% 0.70% 0.10%
Sibiya
2.3: Re-election of director - 669,329,692 75.41% 97.09% 2.91% 0.13%
CA Carolus
2.4: Re-election of director - 669,622,923 75.45% 98.62% 1.38% 0.10%
SP Reid
2.5: Re-election of director - 669,619,746 75.44% 99.98% 0.02% 0.10%
CE Letton
3.1: Re-election of audit 669,618,909 75.44% 99.96% 0.04% 0.10%
committee member and
chairperson – YGH Suleman
3.2: Re-election of audit 669,626,036 75.45% 99.97% 0.03% 0.10%
committee member – A Andani
3.3: Re-election of audit 669,616,217 75.44% 99.97% 0.03% 0.10%
committee member – PJ Bacchus
3.4: Re-election of audit 669,570,480 75.44% 99.92% 0.08% 0.10%
committee member – PG Sibiya
4: Approval for the issue of 669,614,085 75.44% 93.69% 6.31% 0.10%
authorised but unissued
ordinary shares
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Special Resolutions Number of Percentage Percentage Percentage Percentage
shares of shares for against abstained
voted voted
1: Approval for issue of shares 669,630,793 75.45% 93.78% 6.22% 0.10%
for cash
Advisory endorsement of 669,571,951 75.44% 94.74% 5.26% 0.10%
Remuneration Policy
Advisory endorsement of 668,197,353 75.28% 98.27% 1.73% 0.26%
Remuneration Implementation
Report
2: Approval for the 669,583,560 75.44% 99.34% 0.66% 0.10%
remuneration of non-executive
directors
3: Approval for the Company to 669,536,187 75.44% 98.65% 1.35% 0.11%
grant inter-group financial
assistance in terms of section
44 and 45 of the Act
4: Approval for the Acquisition 669,576,657 75.44% 99.83% 0.17% 0.10%
of the Company’s own shares
The special resolutions will be filed with the Companies and Intellectual
Property Commission in accordance with the requirements of the Companies
Act, No 71 of 2008.
Remarks by the Gold Fields Chair, Ms Cheryl Carolus, at the Gold Fields
AGM on 6 May 2021:
“Dear stakeholders
Let me start this meeting by paying tribute to the colleagues who lost
their lives due to mining accidents and the Covid-19 pandemic since the
beginning of last year. In June 2020, Abel Magajane and, last month,
Vumile Mgcine, passed away in underground mining incidents at South Deep.
Their families, friends and colleagues remain in our hearts as they
mourn.
The spectre of COVID 19 has continued to loom large in our lives in this
past year. The virus claimed the lives of 11 Gold Fields’ employees and
contractors. A number of our colleagues also lost loved ones to the virus.
On behalf of the Board, I want to express our heartfelt condolences to the
families and friends of the deceased.
A year ago none of us could have foreseen that the pandemic would still be
with us and what the consequences of the pandemic could be. I want to once
again commend management on its proactive and comprehensive approach to,
first and foremost, protecting our workforce, while at the same time
keeping our mines and projects running safely and assisting our host
communities and governments in mitigating the pandemic’s impact.
We expect that the pandemic will remain a reality for months to come,
perhaps even years, and could impact our operational plans in yet
unforeseen ways. The Board has requested the Group’s management team to
develop strategies on how we can assist in making vaccines available to
our workforce, and, where appropriate, to families and communities, as
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well as continue assisting our people and business to adjust to this ‘new
normal’. The Board has complete confidence in the ability of the Gold
Fields management team and its workforce to continue dealing responsibly
with the ongoing impact of Covid-19.
Succession planning and implementation – both at executive and non-
executive level - has become a normal and healthy part of the life of this
Company. With this in mind, I would formally like to welcome Chris
Griffith, our new CEO, who joined Gold Fields just over a month ago on the
1st of April, following Nick Holland’s retirement at the end of March.
This has been a very smooth process and we are delighted to have attracted
a leader of Chris’ calibre to lead Gold Fields in the next stage of the
companies’ growth. Chris has deep-rooted operational mining experience and
an impressive track record on safety, sustainability and innovation.
I once again want to express the Board’s gratitude to Nick, who led this
company as CEO for 13 years after 10 years as its CFO. Nick can take
credit for a Company that has chartered its own course over the past
decade to become a global leader in mechanised and sustainable gold
mining.
I also want to pay tribute to Rick Menell, who stepped down as Deputy
Chairperson after 13 years in February this year. Rick has fulfilled many
substantial roles on the Board over this period and led the search for the
new CEO. I want to thank him for his support and invaluable contribution.
We also accepted the resignation of Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa due to her
role as Naspers’ CEO. With the appointment of Philisiwe Sibiya, we have
found a well-qualified leader with solid business experience. We wish
Phuthi well and welcome Philisiwe to the Board.
I want to use this opportunity to announce my intention to step down from
the Board of Gold Fields, both as Chair and a non-executive director, at
the AGM in 2022. I do believe that after 12 years it is time for me to
move on in the best interest of the Company and good governance, and to
announce this timeously and transparently to enable the Board to find a
successor.
I believe the year is adequate for myself and the board to ensure a smooth
leadership transition for Chris and to have the necessary time for a
proper search for a new Chairperson and enable an orderly handover to my
successor.
Let me now provide a brief overview of the Company’s performance over the
period under review. Our 2020 operational performance speaks for itself –
despite the challenges and disruptions of the year, the Company delivered
a strong set of results in 2020. The impact of Covid-19 was limited to
approximately 3% of production and, while our operations spent an
additional US$30m to deal with the pandemic, both costs and production
were within revised market guidance.
Amid record net cash-flows and earnings – both more than double our
performance in 2019 - we reduced net debt by almost US$600m, placing our
balance sheet in a very healthy position and could well be close to zero
net debt within 18 months, while also bringing Salares Norte into
construction and eventual production. Our shareholders also received a
total dividend of R4.80/share for 2020, three times that of 2019.
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In February last year, the Board approved the go ahead for the US$860m
Salares Norte project in Chile. Construction proceeded as planned during
the year, despite the pandemic, and is set for completion in Q1 2023.
Salares Norte is the latest building block in the Company’s growth-
through-development programme of the past four years, during which we also
effectively built two new mines, Gruyere in Australia and Damang in Ghana.
Both mines are now contributing meaningfully to the Group’s cash-flow, as
is South Deep, which continues to show strong financial and operational
improvements.
Gold Fields places a high value on maximising in-country and host
community economic impact. The Group’s value distribution to national
economies amounted to US$2.85bn in 2020. Of this, US$677m – 28% – remained
with our host communities. We achieved this by preferentially employing
from our host communities, prioritising procurement from community
enterprises and channelling our socio-economic development (SED) spend to
these communities. Over the past five years, we have created over US$3.5bn
in host community value, which is a significant investment in the economic
wellbeing of our communities and the estimated 435,000 people who reside
there.
At the same time, we need to ensure that our mining activities do not
adversely impact the environment. Pleasingly, we recorded zero serious
environmental incidents for the second year in a row – a good yardstick of
our success in this area. Similarly, our high levels of water recycling
and reuse limited our uptake of freshwater from our catchment areas, while
our continued investment in renewable energy is one of the ways we limit
our carbon emissions. During 2020, we successfully commissioned renewable
microgrids at our Agnew and Granny Smith mines in Australia. Furthermore,
a renewable microgrid is under construction at Gruyere mine. And now that
we have received the relevant approvals from government, South Deep will
be the next operation in our portfolio to build a solar plant. The Board
approved the R660m construction of the plant this week and it should be
operational in a year’s time.
The Board also seeks to further improve the diversity and inclusivity of
the Company’s workforce. While we made some progress – with around 20% of
our workforce now female – we still have a way to go to truly reflect the
demographics of the countries in which we operate. With the rapid
modernisation of our mines, we also need to ensure that our workforce is
appropriately skilled to meet the challenges of digitisation and
automation. We are adapting training, skills development and recruitment
policies to ensure our people can succeed in these new ways of working.
In recent years, managing environmental, social and governance (ESG)
issues has become an increasingly critical consideration for our
stakeholders – particularly investors. Together with management, the Board
is developing a range of strategic ESG priorities ranging from safety to
climate change, diversity and communities. Before the end of the year, we
plan to publish detailed targets and timelines for these priorities.
The Board wishes to thank all our stakeholders for their ongoing
engagement with the company. Working together we are stronger.
With these remarks let me now proceed to the business of this meeting.”
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Remarks by the Chair of the Gold Fields Social, Ethics and Transformation
Committee, Dr Carmen Letton, at the Gold Fields AGM on 6 May 2021,
“Good afternoon shareholders and our management team.
I want to start by supporting our Board and Chairperson’s praise for the
strong commitment Gold Fields, leaders and employees have shown in
assisting each other, their communities, and their governments during the
current COVID-19 crisis. It has been a trying few months and together we
have managed the pandemic and delivered sound operational results despite
the Covid-19 headwinds.
I would also like to echo our Chairperson’s condolences to the families
and friends of our 11 colleagues who have died since January last year
either as a result of exposure to Covid-19 or in the two fatal incidents
at our South Deep mine. Keeping our people safe remains the continuing
focus of Gold Fields Board and management teams. We will also continue to
extend a helping hand to our host communities wherever and however we can
assist them through the pandemic.
On behalf of the Board I also want to express our deepest condolences to
you Cheryl for the recent loss of Graeme. He was a remarkable man who
loved this country and whose work contributed to making a difference to
society.
It is the responsibility and has been the focus of the Social, Ethics and
Transformation Committee to ensure that Gold Fields has sound
relationships with our stakeholders through responsible business practices
in line with industry-leading guidelines. This wide-ranging mandate built
around our employees and contractors, communities, governments, investors
and business partners is at the heart of Gold Fields’ activities as we
strive to be net impact positive and net value accretive.
Mining is an industry that has significant impacts on the stakeholders it
interacts with and the countries and communities in which it operates. It
is therefore critical that we develop strong relationships and trust with
these stakeholders to create enduring value both for the Company and its
stakeholders.
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The Company’s Stakeholder Relationship and Engagement Policy, approved by
the Board in 2020, seeks to translate this vision into specific
commitments.
This commitment has come to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, which,
while undoubtedly taking a personal and professional toll on our People,
has also brought out the best in them. They have not only ensured that our
mines continue to run safely, profitably and sustainably, but that
stakeholders, particularly our host communities, receive the support they
need to deal with the pandemic crisis.
Ironically, among the few positives to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic
is the development of a closer working relationship with host governments
as we supported their health efforts. The provision of facilities,
resources and much-needed funding has been critical to accelerate and
amplify the programmes by our host governments.
To date our operations have donated more than US$3m to communities and
governments in goods and grants, medical and sanitisation equipment, food
provisions to our most vulnerable communities, protective gear for our
front-line people and educational campaigns in the community. These
contributions demonstrate the commitment of our mines to going beyond
compliance in safeguarding the health and wellbeing of their communities.
Equally positive, governments have declared mining an essential service,
which enables us to continue operating.
At Gold Fields, we continue to create value for our stakeholders in all of
the regions we operate. The Group’s value distribution to stakeholders has
consistently totaled between US$2.4 billion to US$3.0 billion per year
since 2014, when we first started measuring national value creation.
Within this metric a particular focus for the Company is creating enduring
value in our host communities, partnering with them on a shared value
basis and enhancing our social license to operate.
During 2020, US$676m, or 28% of the US$2.85bn in total value creation,
remained with these communities through three key initiatives:
- Preferentially employing people from our host communities,
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- Prioritising procurement from community enterprises; and,
- Supporting socio-economic development of these communities.
Some key statistics that reflect the good work that Gold Fields is doing
in creating economic development in our communities:
- Approximately 53% of our workforce, 8,752 people, are currently
employed from our host communities
- In 2020 we created 672 non-mining jobs through our community
investment programmes;
- Of our total procurement - by far the biggest spending item at our
mines - US$536m, 29% of the total procurement spend, was with
suppliers or contractors from our host communities.
To put this commitment to investing in our communities into a longer-term
context: Over the past five years, Gold Fields has created over US$3.54bn
in community value, which, we believe, presents a significant investment
in the economic wellbeing of our host communities and the estimated
435,000 people who reside there.
At the same time, we need to ensure that our mining activities do not
adversely impact the environment around our operations or damage the
natural resources both our operations and host communities depend on.
Pleasingly, we again recorded zero serious environmental incidents for the
second year in a row – a good yardstick of our success in this area.
Turning to our People strategy. We continue to focus on building a more
diverse and inclusive workforce, with particular emphasis on employing
more women, residents from our host communities and, in South Africa,
historically disadvantaged people.
While we have made progress in this regard – particularly at South Deep,
where Historically Disadvantaged South Africans now comprise 73% (up from
72% last year) of the workforce, and women 23% (up from 20% last year).
But we are falling short when it comes to broader gender diversity across
the Company. Only 20% of our group’s workforce and 21% of our leadership
teams are women.
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A diversity and inclusion strategy was approved by the Board in 2019,
which sets out our People goals for the next five years and to which this
Committee will hold management to account. Our strategy is maturing in
its approach to attraction and retention of female employees as well as
emphasising the importance of ensuring that all people are treated with
dignity and respect. This requires a focus on workplace inclusiveness and
diversity to make our workplaces more stable and sustainable.
Another key aspect of the Company’s HR strategy is to prepare our people
for new ways of working. Understanding and building a view of the “future
of work” to complement our “mines of the future” is the catalyst to our
focus and efforts with our people, both current and future. As we
progress towards the mine of the future, it is inevitable that we will
rely increasingly on new entrants into the labour market who possess the
technical and non-technical skills necessary to prosper at the digital
edge.
It also requires us to retrain, where possible, existing employees to
succeed in an environment where automation, modernisation, mechanisation
and digitisation are key. In the past six years, the company has invested
almost US$100 million in targeted human resources development and training
programmes.
Our new and emerging training and development programmes, recognising our
priorities of diversity, inclusiveness and modernisation, are:
- Unconscious bias training to promote a culture of inclusivity;
- Diversity and inclusion programme , to promote learning in the
virtual world;
- Mental health to build resilience; and,
- Virtual reality training across our sites to promote our
modernisation journey by embracing technology.
The Chair earlier referred to our key strategic priorities and the
Company’s plans to consolidate these into an ESG Charter later in the
year. Two of these ESG priorities are directly related to stakeholders,
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namely “building a diverse and inclusive workforce” and “unlocking
business, community and stakeholder value”.
These priorities are supported by a number of strategic intents, namely:
- Increase the proportion of women in our workforce, including women
in leadership and women in mining in all our operating regions; and
- Drive value to our host countries and communities through in-country
and host community procurement and job creation
I am confident that later this year we will have matched these intents to
detailed targets and timelines that will provide our stakeholders with a
firm road map against which they can track our commitment to consistently
deliver shared value.
Now, just a few words on our increasing focus on Indigenous Peoples issues
in Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are key
stakeholders at all our mines and we already enjoy a respectful
relationship and formal Native Title Agreement with the Yilka and Sullivan
Edwards Peoples at our Gruyere mine. We are embarking on strategies to
develop similar frameworks to support and engage with the Aboriginal
People at our other mines in Western Australia.
Gold Fields Australia is making good progress in implementing its Reflect
Reconciliation Action Plan that seeks to develop respectful relations and
develop formal engagement processes. The Reflect RAP is now complete,
setting the foundation to build capacity at our operations to create
meaningful employment and contracting opportunities for Aboriginal people.
I also believe that through the Reflect RAP our People have a far greater
understanding and cultural awareness of the Indigenous People they
interact with. The second phase of the RAP programme has already commenced
at our mines and offices.
The Region has published a new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Standard,
which seeks to address many of the key issues arising from the Juukan
Gorge incident, as well as advocating a best-practice approach to the
identification, understanding, management and preservation of Aboriginal
cultural heritage sites. Implementation of the Standard will commence in
Q2 2021 and continue throughout the year. The region has also put a
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moratorium on actioning new or existing section 18 applications
(Aboriginal Heritage Act – where impact to a site is unavoidable).
In communicating our programmes and projects to our communities and
People, we have discovered that social media is the most efficient way of
doing so. Over the past five years, we have expanded to all the major
social media platforms – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram – and
experienced strong growth on all them. Combined on all our regional and
national social media platforms, we now have over 350,000 followers, while
the number of engagements with our content hit almost 1 million last year.
Gold Fields is a positive and fast-growing brand with our following up by
50%, impressions up by over 20% and recognition as the top sharer of ICMM
content for the last two years. We recognise that this effort is getting
our story out there, improving our reputation, sharing information and
supporting our people and communities.
In closing, I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to my
co-directors, our management team and all Gold Fields employees around the
world. They have ensured that the Social, Ethics and Transformation
Committee continues to meet its performance objectives, thereby
contributing to the company’s sustainability and success. Their passionate
advocacy of social performance, ethical business and the transformation of
our company is what underpins our success both today and into the future.
Chair’s Special Mention:
Every year I have a SET Chair’s special mention, one that the committee
and I believe has been impactful beyond our original goals and resulting
in extraordinary outcomes for people or environment. This year I would
like to pay tribute to the Gold Fields employees who played their part in
setting up the Tshiamiso Trust, which, for the first time in December last
year, made payments to former mineworkers who contracted Silicosis or TB
from working in underground mines.
The Trust was the outcome of seven years of difficult legal negotiations
and efforts to make provision for and support these mineworkers. Gold
Fields has played a significant and leading role in settling South
Africa’s first-ever class action suit, incorporating government’s payment
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mechanisms and, together with our peers, paying billions of rand into the
Trust. After decades of neglect, these mineworkers are finally receiving
some compensation for the hardships they suffered.”
6 May 2021
Sponsor
J.P. Morgan Equities South Africa (Pty) Ltd
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Date: 06-05-2021 05:16:00
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