In terms of the increase in our dividend, this is consistent with our stated commitment to growing shareholder returns while we continue to invest in the business and maintain a strong balance sheet. Divestment proceeds expected in the near term will further improve our flexibility to maintain strong shareholder returns while continuing to grow the business through the execution of our pipeline of growth projects and exploration.
With a cash balance of $3.3 billion at year end and another $3.0 billion accessible from our undrawn credit facility, our total liquidity at year end was $6.3 billion. Along with forecast free cash flow generation in 2020, this will allow Barrick to fund our immediate growth plans unencumbered by the vagaries of the capital markets.
At an individual site level, there were many stand-out performers with Loulo-Gounkoto, Kibali, Porgera, Veladero, Long Canyon and Jabal Sayid all exceeding the top end oftheir production guidance ranges for 2019 and many more at the top end of their guidance range.
The transformation of the business was also evident in a significantly lower corporate administration cost. Relative to our original guidance for the 2018 year of $275 million, we have now more than halved our spend with an outcome of $130 million for 2019 (excluding severance costs). This was partly achieved through the closure of satellite corporate offices in Tucson, San Francisco and Buenos Aires with substantial reductions in other offices such as Toronto and Santiago in keeping with our mantra of putting the execution of our mine plans in the hands of the people closest to the mine site and eliminating waste and inefficiency. In addition, we eliminated redundant entities in the group which has the benefit of further simplifying our business.
The final element of our transformation has been in relation to our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and consolidation systems environment. Our initial focus was to bring the former Randgold entities into the Barrick consolidation system to facilitate our quarterly reporting.
Following the combination of our Nevada operations with Newmont’s to create Nevada Gold Mines, we also added those systems to our integration roadmap. Going forward, we will be using SAP as our transactional system for the group and we have progressed the design and testing phases of this major two-year project according to plan. This will give us better insights into our business, allowing us to capture further productivity efficiencies and enable timely decision-making.
Dealing with risk effectively is a source for sustainable business and is an integral part of how we protect and create value. During 2019, we made progress with our risk management capabilities to ensure ownership of risk was embedded in our business at the operations across the group. We implemented new procedures in risk management and updated operational risk registers to focus on a risk aware culture allowing risks to be managed within agreed thresholds in a proactive and effective manner. We also introduced a combined group risk register to allow for a top down view of key risks facing the business and to ensure that we deal with risk effectively in all our decision-making.
While 2019 has been a transformative year, we will be the first to acknowledge that more value is on the horizon and we will continue our unrelenting focus on the capture of this upside in order to maintain our position as the world’s most valued gold mining company.
Graham Shuttleworth
Senior Executive Vice-President, Chief Financial Officer