Excerpt from the half year results speech 22/2/24 from Chris Ellison, Managing Director of Mineral Resources Ltd.
And we’re creating a better FIFO experience in our Mining Services for all of the industry. Right now we operate three airports of our own. By the time we get towards the back end of this year, we’re going to have airports in pretty much every site,so we can get our own people to site. We are starting our own airline. We’ve already started bringing charters in. We’ll end up earning about four A319 jets by the end of this year. But basically we’re the only mining company that are flying right now. We’re direct out of Brisbane straight into Kens Bore, Wodgina, Onslow. Shortly we’ll be coming into Kambalda down at Kalgoorlie. So, typically, a FIFO worker on the east coast has to pay their own fares to Perth overnight, at their own cost, and then they go up the Pilbara the next day. So a day and a half each way, and they’ve got to write money out of their own pocket. We’re five and a half hours from Brisbane direct onto our mine sites, at our cost. We’re tapping a whole brand new workforce. We’ll encourage more people to live on the east coast, because we’ve got these services. But We are the go-to place for that whole labour pool coming off the east coast right now. By the end of this year, as I said, all of our FIFO will be run by MinRes Air. And we’re doing that, because we’re going to save tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, where we can put our people – typically what happens, we fly someone up to a Wodgina or a Kens Bore, they get up there tonight. They all overnight, then the next morning, the night shift comes off and they will go on R&R. We’re going to reduce our camp sizes. We’re going to be able to land our people on site at 5:30 in the morning, and they do a shift change at six. And the night shift hops on the plane and goes home. S we’re going to be the go-to place. I mean, but this thing is going to save us millions of dollars. And I could see you smile when I said we’re starting our own airline. You go, of course, why wouldn’t you? I mean, everyone needs an airline. And it’s not going to be called Virgin. I mean, we’re not that good.