SA gold operations

In South Africa, our gold operations consist of underground mining and surface treatment facilities at Beatrix, Driefontein and Kloof in the Witwatersrand Basin. Effective on 22 January 2020, we increased our interest in DRDGOLD from 38.05% to 50.1%, which operates surface tailings retreatment facilities on the West Rand through its wholly-owned Ergo Mining subsidiary and the Far West Gold Recoveries Project.

Our most advanced gold project is Burnstone in Mpumalanga province; projects in study phase include our Southern Free State Project.

Beatrix and certain of our other underground and surface tailings assets also contain significant uranium mineral reserves and resources.

In 2018, total gold production, including DRDGOLD, declined year over year by 16% to 1,176,600 oz primarily due to two safety-related incidents in the first half of the year (one at Driefontein and the other at Kloof), seismic damage to Driefontein underground infrastructure and a strike affecting our gold operations in the fourth quarter. We took immediate steps to enhance the safety performance at our Southern Africa gold operations, including the development of a Zero Harm Strategic Framework, the constitution of a Global Safe Production Advisory Panel and intensifying the development of new safe production technologies including through our DigiMine partnership with the University of Witwatersrand.

Safe production continues to receive an intensified focus across all of our operations.