Newmont Corporation - Teething trouble at Boddington irrelevant

Since August, there have been a number of developments at Newmont Corporation pertaining to its operational performance for the remainder of FY21. Chief among these was the announcement on 5 October that it had delivered the gold industry’s first Autonomous Haulage System (AHS) fleet to its Boddington mine in Western Australia. Notwithstanding COVID-19, the fully autonomous haulage fleet was delivered on time and on budget and will improve both mine safety and productivity as well as its life. Newmont expects full ramp up and realisation of these benefits in the near future. However, during commissioning, the project faced a number of challenges, including unusually severe weather and heavy rainfall, shovel reliability and operational delays associated with managing bench hygiene, as a result of which it now expects to produce 140koz fewer ounces of gold than originally anticipated in FY21 (cf company-wide attributable production guidance for FY21 of 6.5Moz ±5%).