 I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you today. You will have seen that I've titled today's presentation as the story of a turnaround start-up. I know that it seems something of an oxymoron. I mean, how does a start-up get to be a turnaround? So today I'm going to share some of my thoughts on that and also on the actions that we've taken at Linus that has turned us from the course that we were charting 15 months ago. Now let me first start by introducing myself and Linus. As Jack said, I'm the CEO of Linus Corporation. We mine and process rare earth metals. We're listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. At Linus we have, as Jack mentioned, the highest grade proven rare earth deposit in the world at Mount Weldon, Western Australia. We do first stage processing and then put it into bags in containers and shipped to the east coast of Malaysia to a place called Kwan Tan, which is my current home. We've only just recently released an updated resource and reserve statement and even at today's economics we halved at the assumed selling price from what it was when this was last done in 2012. We've proved that the reserve is physically robust with many deposits. You have a lot of marginal material as you move out when you change your economics. They become uneconomic. Actually ours is a very well-defined reserve and in fact there was no significant reduction in either the proven reserves or indeed the life of the mine. Linus All, as well, and this is to Jack's point, best fits today's market. We have a high percentage of NDPR, which of course is the king of the market today. We sell most of our products to customers in Japan, Europe and China with a very small amount here in North America which we are aiming to change. So why did I choose this very provocative title? Well I was prompted to shape this presentation in this way after reading Jack's blog of the 31st of August relating to mollicot filing under Chapter 11. Let me quote from it, what makes a successful mining venture? The answer is the bringing into production of a mine the products of which sell for a profit. I'm not sure about your sentence structure but I agree with the sentiment. It's as simple as that yet when you look at a website entry about us on almost any junior mining venture you are told only that this corporate officer or that director has top school credentials and professional credits and has already made money for shareholders of previous ventures. But upon examination it almost always turns out that the money was made for those others who bought the shares low and sold high. That's about none of these previous ventures became successful producers of profitable products. He went on to talk about the failure of businesses where financial engineering appeared to be the primary goal of the enterprise. I am in firm agreement with much of what Jack says. I have actually now done four corporate turnarounds. My experience is that businesses get into trouble when external factors become negative. They are businesses that have survived and at times appeared to flourish in the good times but they lack the substance and resilience to survive more challenging conditions. They generally fall into three categories. The first, those with a good core business model but they've been poorly managed. These businesses have performed really well in the good times masking the poor performance of management. They typically have overextended themselves and overreached in terms of competence. One of the easy telltale signs I find on this is businesses that engage in relentless M&A activity. I know the bankers in the room think that's fabulous but these businesses never stop for long enough to properly integrate acquisitions or realise synergies. They seem to think that if they just keep changing the landscape no one will be able to do the sums which typically show they have added a lot of profitless revenue. Usually they have taken on too much debt then they are unable to service the debt when market conditions change. This was very much the case in my last turnaround. The second group of companies are those that did not actually have a business model. The types of businesses that come to mind are roll-up plays where it's impossible to identify where the added value really accrues. One of the best examples I can think of is the various roll-ups of marketing services organisations. Typically clients choose individuals for their expertise in this area. Once the business is rolled up and the only asset is actually human capital, the individual leaves the firm, the business is gone. And the third category is businesses that have been created based on elaborate financial engineering with little or no substance in the business itself. There were many examples of these types of firms going under during the global financial crisis. In all cases these businesses lost sight of the basic purpose of business. I'm paraphrasing I think it's Drucker, the basic purpose of business is to make money. And I have a really simple view. There are a bunch of people out there, they've got cash, they're called customers. If your enterprise makes what they want, when they want it, they'll hand their cash over. If your enterprise makes what they want for less than they're prepared to pay, then you have some leftover to pay your bankers and distribute to your shareholders. It is that simple. So interestingly, the rare earth industry is quite small but it can proudly boast examples of all three of the types of companies that I mentioned, so a gold star for that. So if these are the types of companies, what are the underlying reasons that lead to a turnaround or restructuring position? And I've actually come up with six which breaks my own golden rule of no more than five but I didn't want to take any of them out. The first of these is not responding to market disruption. In this case, the company is slow to recognize a change in the market. The famous case study is buggy whips but market disruption can be a new product or it simply can be a change in market dynamics. For many rare earths companies, the problem was the 2010-2011 bubble and the failure was not recognizing the change in market dynamics after the bubble burst. Second reason why companies end up as turnarounds is simply poor operating performance. Not managing production, sales, cash management in particular and this is generally a consequence of a lack of controls and a lack of discipline and thinking within the business. Third point, poor governance at all levels. In fact, many times when companies get into trouble, frankly, if anyone of the management, the board, the auditors or the banks had held their hand up and said stop, they would not actually get to the edge of the cliff and go over it. Huberess, this is very often present and this is from people who believe that success in good times was due to competence and cleverness rather than just dumb luck. Improper purpose, this is about forgetting that the purpose of the business is to create a business and the other thing is in believing that because something is legal, it's right and that's not correct either. And finally, poor stakeholder management. So my experience is that when a business reaches turnaround or restructuring status, generally all those elements are in play to some extent and that was indeed the case with Linus. So 12 months on, we have safe, stable, predictable production at target rates. We have a portfolio of quality customers. We have reset our cost base. We have fewer people, clear accountabilities and the poor performers are largely gone from the business. I have a couple of supervisors that I have my eye on. We have excellent relationships with both of our lenders who have agreed to restructured and highly supportive debt arrangements and last night we released our quarterly results and we've just reported cash flow positive outcome which makes it two quarters in a row and frankly with the diabolically low pricing at present we're very proud of that result. It's about measuring the right things. We have a daily production meeting. I don't go to it every day anymore, I did used to but at every day's production meeting the area manager has to report yesterday's production and he has to tell his colleagues how much he's going to make today and today I can tell you I have a huge amount of confidence that every time those area managers sit there and say well I'm going to make 11 and a half tonnes of NDPR today but that's how much NDPR is going to come out tomorrow. There's change in teaming behaviour. When I arrived it was almost like cracking and leaching was a different factory from the Solven Extraction Unit from the product finishing area yet this is an integrated continuous operation and so now we have a production management team that operates as a team. And the other thing is not thinking we're superstars ourselves. When we have issues we happily seek advice from outside but the way that you do that is important. If you bring in a bunch of technical experts and sit them in an office as advisors on the side you're wasting your dough, that's money but what we have done is we've brought when relevant people in and embedded them in the organisation and so by embedding them in the organisation they model the behaviour, they make the decisions and our people working alongside them can see that and can learn. That's made a huge difference. Then talking a little bit about costs and you know the cost performance has been taking cost out I often say to people it's not actually all that hard, it's just hard work right so particularly when you're talking about overhead costs you know it's not hard you just have to be hard at the task. Our approach however and I would strongly recommend this is that we don't start with how can we save $10 we actually start with how can we do this activity more efficiently. We reduced our head count on the plant as well and sometimes people think that's counterintuitive you know if you reduce people you're going to not be able to make as much. My experience is that if you have too many people you have too little personal productivity and therefore you lose efficiency and so as an interesting statistic we took about 25% of our head count out but we took about 42% of our salary bill and that just reflects my ethos which is that you cut from the top down right it's not the fault of the guy who is working on the tunnel furnace and doing his best job every day that the business is in trouble. We renegotiated contracts which had been you know blindingly obviously you know poor for the business. One of the key ones of these was on two of our chemical reagents and what is it that Poll does which is so good in this area well it's about a focus on customers it's not just our direct customers if we only talk to the metal makers then you know we're lost so this is about engaging through the supply chain where we will win is actually from pull through from end user customers and then the fourth area that we've really focused on is cash flow yeah and I would tell you any business needs a rock solid cash management system for the first 15 years of my working life I worked for Nestle I work for ICI and I worked for Telstra which is like AT&T but bigger and more successful and I never woke up just because it wasn't divested and it wasn't broken up in the 80s in the way AT&T was and I never not once woke up in the morning and thought about how much money is there in the bank not once however since then I've never once woken up in the morning and not thought about how much money is in the bank and this is because the only thing that never lies is the bank statement right you can make a P&L say anything you like you can make a business model say anything you like but the bank statement never lies we made sure that our priorities were clear for everyone and that we didn't start any activity without ensuring we were able to resource it properly we had the right teams doing the right things it's very easy to waste effort in a company managing change and improving performance in the tight time constraints meant getting our priorities right and focusing on the things that actually made a difference it's never difficult to get a candidate list of activities what's certain is you will not be able to do them all well at the same time getting the right list is not easy it took us weeks and many meetings to hone the list from 20 major projects and the same number of minor projects down to five right and when we look at what I think is an impressive list of achievements it's because we've approached our challenges systematically and with discipline we agreed our five major programs of work they are managed with proper project plans and progress is measured and reported and each time we deliver a program of work we move on to the next one on the list we brought our processes under control and we make decisions like we make decisions every day you can't afford to fix the same thing twice right not ever and certainly not in a turn around the third area we really engaged with our people we work with them in the business we still have room to improve further and we have a number of improvement initiatives on foot in every part of the business but today Paul and I sit in front of customers and we can confidently present ourselves to the market as a reliable supplier of quality environmentally assured product backed by supportive lenders if last year was a year of operating fundamentals then this year is the year of the market so as I see you would guess from my presentation that I'm not a clever financial engineer I'm just a poor dumb operating manager I care about my employees I care about my customers shareholders lenders and communities in which my business operates I know that to a greater or lesser extent the quality of my work and my leadership teams work will determine the outcomes and indeed even the quality of life for each of those groups we take this responsibility seriously and with this as a guiding principle and with a liberal dose of competitive drive we are successfully turning around a business that could have easily been irrevocably broken before it started and now we're planning to have some fun