Nic Earner
Managing Director
September 16, 2024 at 4:30 PM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort
Managing Director
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Please welcome to the Timber Goal Conference, managing director, Nick, er G'day. Everyone. For anyone that watches this video, you'll see that this is a nearly empty room as most people have headed out to the afternoon drinks cos I'm the last presenter of the day but to the few diehards who haven't realized that I'm presenting. Thank you for staying. I'll tell you about Alcaine. It's a pretty simple story. We have a producing asset in New South Wales and we have a large exploration project. We put a scoping study on in New South Wales. You can see on the map there that we're in the region that's got Dubbo Orange and Parks in it. Quite a lot of famous mines in this space. You know, you've got cow to the South, you've got North Parks, you've got Cadia and then you, you know, you have our operation there at Tomley. Clearly not at the same scale as as those mines. So for Tomley, we started that mine in 2014, we poured our first gold. So we're 11 years on. And when we first started that mine had a plan to produce about 380,000 ounces. But we've, we've crossed 600,000 ounces and we have another 700,000 ounces ahead of us. So we've added a lot of value to that project through continued operation and through exploration. Let me tell you a little bit about that, but that is ramping up at the moment because we've gone into a new mining area to the south and we're spending capital, we're about halfway through our capital spend program to get there separately. The porphyry that I'll talk about Boor Kaiser. We discovered that in 2019, we've been exploring in the region for a fair bit and we've now put out a scoping study for that and you can see some of the metrics there. This scoping study I did at what was spot prices at the time putting out that was 3500 Aussie gold and $15,000 a ton of copper. And you can see that the N PV to capital around the 1.8 billion Australian is roughly 1 to 1. It's a project that deserves scale. This scoping study put together would only use a third of the resource. Almost all of it indicated little bit about the company. I think, you know, as Chris alluded to, I think the quite achiever tag is, is pretty valid for us in that we've just got on, you know, the last time we raised capital, as Chris said was a fair while ago and we've split out the, Rare Earth project way back in 2020. And since then, we've spent our free cash drilling out and getting Tomley approved and drilling out and doing a scope in the study on Boda. So a market caps around 260 Australian at the moment. And what you'll see,, is, that's about exactly the same as what this year's cash flow is gonna be, is about $260 million. So on, on, on that metric, we're certainly quite low priced. We took out debt with Macquarie, which I'll talk a little to the debt we did was to do development on top of the cash balance that we had at the start of the process and to support that debt, we took out hedging. We did all this about April last year. So we have 87,000 ounces of hedging averaging 2840 which puts it pretty much almost 1000 bucks out of the money on today's gold price per ounce. But that, that's about 35 to 40% of our production depending which quarter you're on all the way through to June 2027. We have very few fundamental institutions in our register, the majority of our institutions you see there are index or quant funds and our chairman Mr Gandel holds a bit over 18% of the company. So Tom Le a mine that we've been operating for a while. Just picture top left. That's the four open cuts. We're now underground under those. And then we have an extension down to the South. Picture in the top right is a paste plant and then the rest is pretty self explanatory. So you can see on the cartoon image on the right that you can see there is our existing pits and we have an underground drive that we drove all the way down about 2.5 kilometers over the last couple of years down to a new area that we call Roswell, which is now being developed. And that's why you can see the ramp up in the chart is because Roswell is a higher grade, more ounces per vertical meter. And so this year, we'll do between 70 80,000 ounces. This year, we have a higher all in sustaining cost because as we've arrived at the new ore body, we're developing both up and down at exactly the same time. So we're doing double the amount of development we normally do and then the all in sustaining costs fall down next year. The only reason it's going from sort of that 75 average to 85 90,000 average is purely within Roswell. There's just different grades at different places and that's where the mining sequence goes through. And then we're gonna realign the Newell Highway and bring in the open cuts that you see there at San Antonio. And that will move us to 100,000 ounce run rate from that point. It's a pretty simple story and we're pretty much nearly finished the first phase of capital. So we're about to commission the flotation plant, regrind circuit and paste plant that we have as all part of this first phase of bringing in the new mining area. There's a capital project timing. As you can see, we're well through and the new high and the co op road, one thing I really want to stress to people is yes, we'll be spending money on that. That's not an immediate and urgent need. We've, we've commenced that work, but we can speed that not really speed up, but mostly we could slow down that expenditure if we, if we had to, but set with gold at the price that it is. We're trying to do everything as fast as we can. So, you know, here's quite a lot of detail on what's gonna be a transformational period over the next two years, you can see the grades are rising and then in early 2026 they fall again as we bring the open cuts online, you can see our ounces going up, our mil tons going up. The thing to stress is we're already at, you know, we did 18,000 ounces last quarter. We're on track to about 18,000 ounces this quarter. You know, that's a 72,000 ounce run rate. We're already at this run rate that we're talking about, it's just some great inefficiencies that will slowly move us forward. And then of course, the recovery will kick in when our flotation and re circuit starts. So we're pretty, pretty pleased with that. And then of course, our growth in capital really falls away. And so hence the decrease in oil and sustaining cost. So over the next five years, you know, we can see that we're moving to around that 100,000 ounce mark. And I think hopefully that'll make a bit of a difference. The thing I really wanna stress is we do have definitely have production beyond the current plan, we've got reserves, we've got resources, we're open at depth underneath all of the clo which are up to the north and all of Roswell and San Antonio. So there's a fair bit going on, but it's, this is the bit that I can define with a lot more certainty. Voters. The second part is a, a large project that I showed you at the start. So we did this scoping study. I think the thing to realize is that this is a very, very large resource. I've got some pits to show you on the next slide. But this, this resource has 8 million ounces of gold in it at an average grade for that gold only of 0.3 g per ton. It's got 1.5 million tons of copper and an average grade of 0.2% copper. And that combines up to a gold equivalent grade of between 0.55 and 0.6 depending on what copper price you use. And so we had hoped to do a smaller scale project, but it became apparent the longer that we studied it, that the size and scale of what we're after really suggested that we need a, a much larger project in order to do the it justice. And you can see that even though we move 20 million tons per annum in the first, you know, this would be 17 years, just these open cuts. And I'll show them on this picture even though we move, even though we do that, we still have two thirds of the resource in that picture, Kaiser, that sort of clump you can see in boda all drilled it 50 by 50 they're all indicated, but at depth under Kr under, under Kaiser, under Boa and then to the South through 23, that's all inferred, all inferred material. So what are we doing now with that? We've got a whole of exploration that we're doing up to the Northwest chasing higher grade as well as volume but higher grade would be good. We are doing environmental studies. Everyone knows that the sooner you get onto your environmental baseline studies, the better off you're going to be in any environment. So that's what we're doing there. And we are also looking at, you know, what might a, what might a sublevel cave have looked like? So, and what, what does all that mean? We're also engaging with potential partners. And so what do I mean by that? It's clear that unless something transformational occurs, which we would obviously continue to seek in our business that doing a, you know, $1.8 billion development will need some kind of financial partner and, or someone with that kind of degree of operating experience. So that's what we continue to chase and engage with not burning a hole in our pockets. Cos we only spend sort of 3.5 $4 million here in a greater $6 million expiration budget over the year. But certainly we're very happy and happily engaging with parties to try and understand what we've got here and how it might fit into their organizations as well as add value to ours. So, company summary for us, really simple. We're ramping up Tommy, we've taken out debt, we're paying that down and we've got a lot of growth that we're doing to really bet ourselves in for the next seven years. Bo Bo Kaiser. I've just spoken about that and, you know, there's a, there is a next generational project they're wanting to go and just a little about Alcaine because I do, you know, attract some questions around. Well, how are you gonna go about doing this, this getting this done? Remember that Alcaine has operated for a very, very long time in the region. But if we just look over this last 12 year period, we've had three major projects approved the original Toing Le the double Rare Earth projects and then the Toing Extension project all gone through the planning approvals process including being allowed to move a highway, put in tailing stamps the whole nine yards. So we're confident that we are competent in that. If you look at our team, you know, over the last 11 years, we've only missed our production guidance in one year. That was last year and the bottom of our guidance was 60,000 ounces and we did 57,000 ounces. So we're pretty good at predicting how well we're gonna go. So if you look at this and you look at the value that we present, certainly, I think that if we execute the plan in accordance with how we do it, our stock represents great value opportunity. And so that said, I'll throw back to Chris to ask me some questions unless some of you, oh, the audience for people watching online, the audience has swelled to about 100 and 50 people now. So we're sure to get a lot of questions. Once I heard I was on, we got Nick in just a second and I'm gonna put Stephen Thomas on notice. I want a question from you in a, in a second. Before Stephen asks us a question though, Nick. you have been acquired achiever. You, you've delivered largely against what you said you were going to do. You delivered value by the specie of the rare earths business to shareholders. You've had exploration interest and potential success and things like boa you capped at $200 million. You've got, you've got visibility in terms of your business. I know there are, there are other a s six companies which have a much higher market cap and arguably you should be sharing some of that sort of interest. What's the market missing? Why is it missing? Ah, I think there's a couple of factors and this is from discussions with, you know, people here, but also, you know, retail investors either on the phone or through Noosa or Gold Coast are the places where people go. I think number one, you know, a year ago when we executed the plan and the debt, we took out cos we needed to debt and hedging in order to execute our plan. And I think with $1000 move up in the, in the price that, that gives us a mark to market, that's out of money. I think people look just at that, they don't look at the underlying cash flow that's coming from that. And when you can look at some of our peers and say, well, they're just making money without any debt, they're free of debt. And hedging then you think? Oh, well, I'll, I'll back those but I would agree that,, certainly given that some of those have run, I imagine people will turn their eyes back to us. I think the second thing is that now broadly,, I think that people don't understand where we're going with Voter Kaiser. I've, I've tried to really articulate,, articulate that particularly in terms of the amount of money we're spending. But I do get some questions saying, well, are you perpetually come issue? Because in seven or 10 years time, you might need $1.8 billion. I mean, sure. But that's, you know, a very simplistic way of looking at it when I've articulated that we wanna look, you know, look and merge and, you know, not merge but do something for value. And I think, I think the third thing is that just that our projects located in New South Wales, you know, and I don't mean that there's a tension against New South Wales, what I mean is we're not part of an active continual m and a discussion all the time. So, yeah, I think all of those factors just keep you off the radar a bit mate. Yeah, New South Wales. And the recent judgment against Regis is interesting. It is, but certainly the thing that people should remember, which is not great is that it's a federal government decision they passed all through the New South Wales for. So that decision could go down anybody's property anywhere. It could go down the territory, it could go down in, w A could go down in. Tassie. Understood., just a quick one. Nick. It's, it's always struck me as a, although a modest level of gold production as you pointed out there, you've, you've always met your targets. Just one thing I'm trying to establish, setting aside the copper gold plate, the bigger play has there been a reasonable cash bill over the last few years in the business? So, you know, was that all going on? Yeah, so, so we have spent all the cash that we built. So we, we, we built our cash up to circa 100 and $20 million. But since 2019, we spent circa $30 million drilling out Tommy. We spent nearly $20 million buying all the properties underneath it and studies and development and all that kind of stuff we put in a $30 million exploration decline down to Roswell. We built a new tailing ST that now has, you know, life of mind storage capacity. So that's where we spent the money. And as well as that, we've spent nearly $70 million on, on the copper gold porphyry cos we thought that had long-term value. We spent the better part of $50 million there drilling, you know, 100 and 70 odd kilometers worth of drilling some of those holes go down 1.2 K and we purchased properties under that as well. So we really tried to get ourselves in this position where we were, you know, really set up for the next phase. So we're gonna be generating a serious amount of cash coming forward because we've, the spending that we wanted to do has sort of been done now and is in the rearview apart from this next stage of execution at Tom. Yeah, Nick, thanks for that very important presentation. Thanks.
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