The invitation to speak today was in the form of a single sentence
instruction: How does your company run and how do you
communicate from top to bottom? It looks like I'll have to let you into our little secret. The team
at Croesus know what works for us but we've never talked about
it with others - least of all presented it at a conference such as
this. In fact we tend to avoid the jargon normally associated with
Best Practice or TQM, however in our own way, each of our staff
are 100 per cent loyal to our company's aim to maintain and
strengthen our commercial success. Just how we achieve this at Croesus is the subject of this
presentation today, but first a little history. My dear old grandfather arrived in Kalgoorlie, as a mining
engineer 100 years ago. Do you think he would have chuckled if
someone suggested to him that a hundred years later we would
just be starting to understand Kalgoorlie's geological mysteries? Well, here we are 100 years later and Croesus Mining is
fortunate to be part of a generation now realising the true
potential of Kalgoorlie's Goldfields. This provides us with a very fertile field in which to sow the
seeds we can obtain from the World's Best Practice in Mining and
Processing. With each new mineral deposit being discovered, old theories
are being exploded. Each new deposit has a personality of its
own, leading to some belated pioneering theories of where to drill
next, and how to reduce internal costs so that we can win the war
against constantly increasing external costs. What we have now and what the old timers didn't have is a
huge database of geological input spanning several gold booms
and a couple of nickel booms. My only interest in history is to pick up the points that may
help us for our future. This is what we are doing in our company
which is something of a David, in the David to Goliath range of
mining companies in Australia. As a humbling thought; of the 115 164 tonnes of gold that the
world's mines have produced throughout history, four tonnes
have been produced by Croesus Mining. That's equivalent to
0.003 per cent of the total world's gold production. In the past financial year we achieved a dividend yield of
five per cent. To put this into perspective, that's over twice the
dividend yield of BHP, Australia's largest company. As we are somewhat less known than BHP, let me spend a few
moments giving some particulars of our company's background.