Earnings Call Excerpt
BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP)
Preliminary Results 2007
August 22, 2007 3:30 am ET
Executives
Charles Goodyear - Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director
Marius Kloppers – Group Executive and Chief Executive Non-Ferrous and Executive Director
J. Michael Yeager – Group Executive and Chief Executive Petroleum
Alexandre Vanselow – Group Executive and Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
Neil Goodwill – Goldman Sachs JBWere
Unidentified Analyst – Morgan Stanley
Vicky Binns – Merrill Lynch
Jason Fairclough – Merrill Lynch
Heath Jansen – Citigroup
Sylvain Brunet – Exane BNP Paribas
Ross Gardner – J.P. Morgan
[Karen Daily] – [Investing Securities]
Lawrence [Quake] – Quarry Bank
Tim Gerrard - Austock
Eddie Myer – Channel 10 News
John Mackinnon – Deutsche Bank
Sam Catalano – Macquarie Bank
Jeremy Gray – Credit Suisse
Grant Sporre - UBS
[Tobias Lerner] – (inaudible) Global
Presentation
Chip Goodyear
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Chip Goodyear, Chief Executive Officer of BHP Billiton, and welcome to our presentation today of our financial results for the 2007 fiscal year. I’m here in Sydney, and with me in Sydney is Marius Kloppers. Marius is the Chief Executive of our Non-Ferrous materials business. And as you know, he will be taking over for me as Chief Executive Officer on the first of October. Marius and I have some prepared comments today, as will Alex Vanselow. Alex, as you know, is our Chief Financial Officer. Alex is in London, and he will be speaking to us from there. And we also have Mike Yeager with us today. Mike is the Chief Executive Petroleum. He’s in Johannesburg where he’s going to be doing a road show. And so Mike, Alex, and Marius will all join you in answering questions later today.
So let’s move on to our highlight slide, slide number four. And as usual, I’ll begin with safety. Now in 2007, we saw a 17% decrease in our injury frequency rate. We saw an improvement in all but one of our business units, and we had some outstanding performances in petroleum, aluminium, stainless steel materials, and diamond and specialty products. But, unfortunately, we had eight fatalities in our business in 2007.
Now obviously that’s not only measured in terms of the devastating human impact of that, but it also is an indication that poor performance in safety is also represented in poor performance in our operations. So we often found where there were safety issues in a business, those businesses also had the most difficulty in meeting their operating objectives. In 2008, you’ll see this company focus more intently on the implementation of our fatal risk control protocols, as well as continuing to push down that injury frequency, and injury frequency rate.
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