Quintel completes a fifth consecutive year without a fatality at a managed operation

Quintel has completed 2025 with no fatalities at any managed operation, the fifth consecutive year in which that has been the case. The group’s total recordable injury frequency rate was 1.94 per million hours worked, an 18% improvement on 2024, across 21.4 million hours worked by employees and contractors.

The group also recorded 31 high-potential incidents — events that did not injure anyone but that, under marginally different circumstances, could have caused a fatality. Every one was investigated to root cause, reviewed personally by the Chief Operating Officer, and reported in full to the board’s Sustainability and Safety Committee.

The four causes behind those 31 incidents

Publishing a fatality-free year without publishing the near misses would be misleading. The concentration of causes matters more than the count.

• Vehicle and mobile equipment interaction (12 incidents). Proximity detection is now fitted to 94% of the mobile fleet, with full coverage targeted by the end of 2026.
• Working at height and fall protection (7 incidents). A single group-wide permit standard replaced four site standards in October 2025.
• Isolation and energy control (6 incidents). Lock-out verification audits were increased from monthly to weekly at all operations.
• Ground and geotechnical failure (6 incidents). All six occurred underground; dynamic support standards were extended to two additional development horizons at Asankran.

“Five years without a fatality is a fact and not an achievement, because the difference between five years and four is often a metre and a second,” said Thandeka Mokoena, Chief Executive. “The thirty-one high-potential incidents are the honest picture of where we are. Two of them scared me personally, and both are named in the board papers.”

Safety performance is a gateway condition in the group’s variable remuneration framework. The framework can reduce variable pay for safety outcomes but cannot increase it, a structure adopted in 2021 to remove any implication that safety is something executives are paid extra to deliver.