Tom Palmer
President, Chief Executive Officer at Newmont
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. Today, I'm joined by my Executive Leadership team, including Natascha Viljoen and Karyn Ovelmen, and we'll all be available to answer your questions at the end of the call.
Can I please ask you to note our cautionary statement and refer to our SEC filings, which can be found on our website. Before we begin today, I'd like to take a moment to remember the three colleagues who sadly lost their lives working for Newmont this year. Mike Kabita-Morrison, or Cobby [Phonetic] as he was known to his friends and colleagues, was a dedicated and hardworking member of our Ahafo North Project team and a natural leader.
Cobby was a son, a husband, a father, a dear friend to many, and he will be greatly missed. Rosanna Lester-Mart [phonetic] was a daughter, a wife, and a mother to a young daughter. A civil engineer, Rosanna was part of the original team that developed Cerro Negro 11 years ago and had aspirations to soon become a part-time farmer in Argentina.
And Daniel Ochoa, a son, a father to two young boys, a partner, and a brother. He has been described by his colleagues as a strong team member with ambitions to further develop his career in mining. The investigations into these tragic incidents have been led by two of our managing directors from different business units, with the support of teams of subject matter experts to ensure that we truly understand the cause of the incidents.
Our response will include implementing both immediate measures from early observations from the investigations, as well as taking a structured approach to reinvigorate our safety systems, tools, and in-field leadership activities that will all have a heavy focus on the quality of application. Sadly, these recent incidents are a stark reminder of the need to maintain discipline and a relentless focus on safety fundamentals. The loss of Adam Kennedy, Cobby, Rosanna, and Daniel over the past six months has had a profound impact on the entire Newmont family, and it is with great humility and resolve that we will continue to challenge ourselves to ensure that everyone working in our business goes home safely to their loved ones.
Turning to our quarterly results, we are firmly on track to deliver our 2024 guidance. We are pleased with our operational performance in the first quarter and remain focused on delivering consistent results as guided over the remainder of this year and beyond. I also want to reiterate the four key commitments that we have made to our shareholders.
We continue to make progress on these commitments and I'd like to provide a brief update on our first quarter achievements, starting with strengthening Newmont's position as the gold industry's recognised sustainability leader. Last week, Newmont published our 20th Annual Sustainability Report along with our third annual Taxes and Royalties Contribution Report, both providing a detailed and transparent look at our values-driven approach to sustainability and the economic contributions we made in the jurisdictions and communities that we operate in.
With this sustainable foundation in place, we have created the industry's strongest portfolio of world-class gold and copper assets in the most favourable mining jurisdictions. And from this portfolio, we produced 1.7 million ounces of gold at an all-in sustaining cost of $1,439 an ounce in the first quarter. We continue to expect these unit costs to improve throughout the year, driven by both higher production in the second half and the delivery of synergies.
I'd also note that in the first quarter, our go-forward Tier 1 portfolio produced 1.4 million ounces of gold at $1,378 an ounce. Our Tier 1 portfolio also produced over 480,000 gold equivalent ounces from copper, silver, lead and zinc and included in this number is the 35,000 tons of copper that we produced and sold.
We generated $776 million of cash flow from operating activities in Q1 including a $666 million reduction from working capital which Karyn will cover in a few minutes. And when we exclude the $291 million one-time stamp duty payment we made in February in connection with our acquisition of Newcrest free cash flow for the quarter would have been $217 million.
Our second quarter production and costs are expected to remain relatively consistent with the first quarter, and we continue to expect that our gold production will be weighted to around 53% in the second half of the year, remaining firmly on track to achieve our full-year guidance on both production and cost basis. In the first quarter, we also continue to progress the divestment of our six high-quality non-core assets this year, and this morning we announced the sale of our Lundin Gold financing facilities, generating $330 million in cash proceeds and furthering our commitment to maximising shareholder value by monetising our non-core assets.
We continue to maintain our exposure to Fruta del Norte through our equity interest in Lundin Gold. Underpinned by the industry's strongest portfolio of gold and copper assets, we remain committed to maintaining a disciplined and balanced approach to capital allocation. As part of this, we declared a first quarter dividend of $0.25 per share, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to returning capital to shareholders. We refinanced approximately $2 billion in debt related to the Newcrest acquisition, and we continue to advance our four key projects we have in execution, our second expansion at Tanami, our new mine, Ahafo North, and our two new blockades at Cadia.
And finally, turning to Synergies, we remain firmly on track to deliver on our commitments. In the first quarter, we achieved $56 million in Synergies, bringing the total delivered to $105 million since we closed our acquisition of Newcrest in November last year, and building solid momentum towards our commitment of delivering a $500 million Synergy run rate by 1st January 2026.
We have identified a series of initiatives, each with action plans and dedicated resources in place, that have us on track to achieve a $335 million run rate by the end of this year, representing two-thirds of our $500 million Synergy commitment and well ahead of the run rate we estimated when we announced this commitment in May of last year. Beginning with the core of this value delivery, we are seeing great opportunities emerging from our full potential work, and we are just getting started. At Lihir, we recently completed the first phase of full potential, from which we have identified initiatives that will deliver more than $150 million of value, close to double the Synergy target we allocated to this new Tier 1 operation in our portfolio.
I've just returned from Lihir, and the key to extracting this value will be simplification. Following a very similar approach to the one we used at Penasquito five years ago, we have key members of our Newmont technical team on the ground in PNG, supporting the site team to work on simplifying operations by focusing on the areas that will genuinely move the needle and stopping the non-value activities that have historically plagued this operation. One example of this work is the work we are doing to de-bottleneck the materials handling and crushing circuits, which have been limited by Lihir's different ore properties, resulting in downtime from spillage, blocked chutes and blocked crushers.
From this initiative alone, we expect to improve mill throughput and generate over $50 million in annual cash flow improvements. Amid future waves of opportunities already identified at Lihir, we remain very excited about the untapped potential at this Tier 1 operation. We are also well into the first phase of our full potential work at Cadia, Red Chris and Brucejack, and have already identified several high value opportunities that we will progress in parallel with the initiatives now underway at Lihir.
For our supply chain synergies, we have already realised close to $30 million from negotiating more favourable terms and pricing for materials and equipment, as well as first consolidating and then renegotiating service contracts. As we look ahead, we will continue to work closely with our key suppliers, leveraging our unmatched scale and global partnerships to seek improvements through negotiations and tenders over the course of the year. Then turning to G&A, we have already achieved over 80% of the synergies that we committed to, and we expect to exceed our $100 million G&A commitment by the end of this year.
Most of our G&A synergies are coming from employee and contractor rationalisation, as we expected, and to a lesser extent from reductions in insurance premiums and other administrative fees. We look forward to realising the significant production and cost benefits from our synergy work, and we will continue to provide you with updates on our progress each quarter. And with that, I'll now pass it to Natascha and then Karyn for an update on our operational and financial performance for the quarter.
Over to you, Natascha.
