Investment case

We are one of the largest diversified mining companies in the world, with top five industry positions in seven essential commodities.

Our products are used throughout the economic cycle, from generating electricity and providing essential construction materials to manufacturing cars, mobile phones, white goods and jewellery. And demand for the commodities we produce is growing, largely fuelled by the industrialisation and urbanisation of emerging economies in Asia.

In response, we are growing our business, primarily by developing an extensive pipeline of organic growth projects to increase production volumes by 50% by the end of 2014, reduce average operating costs by around 20% and introduce a number of new, world-class operations into our portfolio. Our investments will deliver robust average returns of around 20% even at conservative long-run commodity prices. We also continue to look for attractive merger and acquisition opportunities to create value.

We are proud of our ongoing achievements in transforming the operating, safety and environmental performance of our operations, adding to our mineral reserves and resources and extending the lives of our operations to increase the underlying value of our business. We have an unrivalled track record of reducing real operating costs every year and we have improved safety performance by over 79%* since 2002.

We conduct our business activities ethically and with the maximum transparency commercially possible, led by a robust Board with a majority of independent non-executive directors. We aim to achieve industry-leading standards of health, safety and environmental performance and we seek to create lasting benefits from our presence for the communities in which we live and work.

Delivery of our strategy is supported by a strong and flexible balance sheet that enables us to fund our growth and maintain a strong investment grade credit rating.

Our business is highly decentralised to foster an entrepreneurial spirit, rapid decision-making and accountability at every level of the organisation.

• *“safety performance” is defined as “improvement in total recordable injury frequency rate per million hours worked 2002-2010 including contractors”.