A few months ahead of Sociedad Minera Cerro Verde's participation in PERUMIN 36, an event organized by the Peruvian Institute of Mining Engineers, Julia Torreblanca, Vice President of Corporate Affairs of the Freeport-McMoRan-controlled copper producer, shares the company's expectations for the mining convention, recent advances in innovation, social development initiatives and gender equality goals.

How important is PERUMIN for Sociedad Minera Cerro Verde's purposes?

At Cerro Verde we consider that PERUMIN is a great opportunity to highlight and analyze the importance of the mining activity in the integral development of our country, both in the economic and social aspects. It is also a space to discuss the most important issues related to the sustainability of the mining activity and to learn from world-class experts.

We also believe that the slogan chosen for this year ("Investment generating wellbeing and sustainable development") reminds us of the challenge that the sector faces today to continue building a better country together with the State and civil society, setting concrete and measurable goals in which we can join forces for the benefit of the population.

In addition, Cerro Verde is proud that this business event, one of the most important in the mining sector in the world, will take place in Arequipa, the city where it operates sustainably and where it promotes a series of initiatives to contribute to its growth, generating value beyond its mining activity.

What are the company's expectations and what novelties will it present at the event?

We believe it is very important that PERUMIN presents a series of innovative proposals in several areas (technological, regulatory and environmental), which will strengthen the standards that Peruvian companies have today, also showing the good practices developed in different mining operations and promoting the competitiveness of our country as an important investment destination. These three issues are of vital importance to Cerro Verde, which is why we are constantly seeking to innovate in order to achieve greater efficiency in our operations and maintain optimal communication with our different stakeholders.

Likewise, we consider that the participation of mining companies in PERUMIN 2023 contributes to show the immense possibilities that this activity can generate in the development of the different regions of the country. For example, in the case of Arequipa, Cerro Verde's mining activity represented 34% of its GDP in 2022 and generated 9606 direct jobs and 102,143 indirect jobs, according to a study by APOYO Consultoría.

What recent operational improvements have you incorporated and how are they impacting?

We would like to highlight the culture of innovation promoted by Cerro Verde in its different areas (even since Minero Peru operated our Production Unit) and which is promoted today through different agile initiatives and also in a more structured way through the INNOVA program. This program has been in place since 2010 and has been providing successful results for the improvement of the various processes at the mine.

In addition, INNOVA has had a great acceptance among our personnel with a series of benefits, since it allows us to measure how value is added to the company in each proposal submitted, motivates competitiveness internally, fosters pride and seeks sustainability in our processes.

What specifically has this initiative achieved at Cerro Verde?

For example, as a result of the work of an agile multidisciplinary team of more than 50 people in the company, an artificial intelligence project has been implemented that allows us to increase the production of copper pounds, simultaneously controlling a series of complex operating variables, pressures, flows, among others. Through artificial intelligence, the work performed by the area's personnel is recorded and learned from, all existing legacy data is analyzed and process improvements can be implemented when similar future conditions occur. As a result of this initiative, Cerro Verde has been able to increase its production of copper pounds by up to 6%.

It should be noted that this effort by the Cerro Verde team received the National Mining Award in the last edition of PERUMIN.

Finally, we would like to highlight that thanks to the Innova program, we have more than 10 patents registered with Indecopi and we have recently obtained three new ones, which will allow us to improve our production processes.

How are they supporting community health, education and productivity?

In education, we have been strengthening the competencies of teachers in regular basic education, granting scholarships and providing free training in science; to this end, we have developed the STEAM+H Program (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths + Humanity) as a new educational approach and the STEAM Robotics Program as a pedagogical tool. In addition, we promote environmental education, integral communication and logical-mathematical reasoning.

We also focused on improving educational infrastructure, providing school furniture and equipping educational institutions with information and communication technology. Finally, we have implemented a psychological support service that includes counseling, support and therapeutic tools for students, parents and teachers.

In health, we carried out campaigns and fairs in vulnerable sectors, providing free medical care and medicines; we strengthened the capacities of doctors and nurses to provide better patient care; we promoted the fight against anemia by screening children and monitoring pregnant women; we also distributed free information material, supplements and medicines to prevent and combat this disease.

In addition, we improved the health infrastructure and provided biomedical equipment for various health centers in the areas of screening, medical offices and laboratories.

On the other hand, we believe that we could provide technical support to the Regional Government in the execution of its budget, seeking to improve its efficiency, for example, in the construction of essential infrastructure for the city. According to a report recently released by IPE, the regions of Ancash and Arequipa received the highest mining transfers in the last decade, but have the lowest execution rates of public investment projects.

We also want to highlight that we will use for the first time the mechanism of Works for Taxes, coordinating with the local governments of our area of influence or with the regional government for its implementation. At this time, we have not confirmed in which area the projects will be carried out, but we believe they could be developed to improve trafficability (on roads near our operations) or address water issues. We expect to have some projects already defined in September, when they visit Arequipa and participate in PERUMIN.

What is the commitment to equal opportunities for women and men?

We appreciate that many mining companies are promoting different equity, diversity and inclusion programs to get more women into the industry, however, we believe that we have a pending agenda to accelerate these efforts and generate a change that will undoubtedly add a lot of value to mining.

It is important to mention that Freeport-McMoRan is an equal opportunity employer and is working to increase the percentage of female participation in its various operations around the world. In the case of Cerro Verde, currently about 6% of our workers are women, and we are attentive to identify female operators, technicians and professionals who have experience in their specialties, even if they have not worked in mining before.

Our aim is to help women to naturally see the mining sector as one in which they can develop their skills and generate a positive impact on the country, and to stop seeing it as a space for men only. I am sure that more women will be encouraged to work in mining, as PERUMIN will help us to showcase the important contribution of the mining sector, its responsible practices with the environment and the surrounding communities, as well as the importance of achieving the decarbonization of its activities; factors that contribute to making our activity sustainable and key to the future of all.