[miningmx.com] — NOT the least merit of Anglo American’s 2007 annual report is that – at 172 pages, plus cover – it’s not too bulky for home delivery, both obviating the need for collection at your local Post Office and sparing a whole forest.
A key reason is that the statement of accounting policies is compressed into only four-and-a-half pages, much less than at some of its Alsi Top 40 peers. It also eschews expensive full-page colour photos of open pit mines – after all, once you’ve seen one you’ve pretty much seen them all – in favour of a wealth of facts on ore reserves and resources, production statistics and the like.
In fact, the biggest photos are of chairman Sir Mark Moody-Stuart and CEO Cynthia Carroll, though in keeping with the new egalitarian approach, they also appear in thumbnail size among the montage of 90 employees on the front cover.
Egalitarianism has its limits, though. The remuneration report discloses that, for the slightly less than full year she served, Carroll’s basic salary of £900,000 topped the £786,000 her predecessor – Tony Trahar – got in 2006. Her total emoluments of £2.7m were also well ahead of the £2m Trahar took home the year before.
Moreover on joining, Carroll received what, post the Mondi unbundling, has become 121,000 shares to compensate for long-term incentives forgone at her previous employer. Those will be released over the next three years; also the term of Anglo’s long-term incentive plan, under which she’s been granted a further 74,000 shares. The long term obviously ain’t what it used to be.
In any event, at the current R440/share those 121,000 shares are worth around R53m – not a bad signing-on fee, if not so impressive in US dollars, the currency used everywhere else in the report.
Indeed, however much Anglo protests its continuing commitment to South Africa there isn’t even a gesture to local shareholders with a pro forma statement of results in rand.
But that lack – and an inadequate five-year tabulation of only earnings and dividends per share – are the only real shortcomings in an excellent and comprehensive document.
