Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Central Asia Metals, CAML's full year 2022 results. Just flicking through the slides, just standard disclaimer. Starting off with a company preview. Just to remind everybody what CAML does and where it does it. We have operations in Kazakhstan, which is a SXEW solvent extraction-electrowinning plant that produces pure cathode copper of the magnitude around 13,000 tons-14,000 tons. Last year, we announced 14,254 tons of cathode copper. We have a life of mine in Kazakhstan out to 2034. On the back of the success at Kounrad in Kazakhstan, we acquired the Sasa Mine in North Macedonia in late 2017. This is a more traditional underground zinc and lead mine in the northeast of Macedonia.
Last year, we produced 21,473 tons of zinc in concentrate and 27,354 tons of lead in concentrate. Our guidance this year is 19,000 tons-21,000 tons of zinc and 27,000 tons-29,000 tons of lead. Coming to the next slide 5, just some of the highlights of our results for 2022, the financial numbers that Gavin, our CFO, will expand upon in a minute. We generated revenue of $232.2 billion and an associated EBITDA of $131.6 million. That's an EBITDA margin of 57%. The free cash flow, an important number for CAML 'cause it drives the dividend, was $89.7 million for the year.
That drove us to announce this morning a final dividend for 2022 of 10 p , making 20 p for the full year or 47% of our free cash flow. Up on 2021, but in absolute terms, the same number as 2021 at 20 p full year dividend. We have cash in the bank of $60.6 million, and we have no debt now, having fully repaid the debt that we took on to acquire Sasa five years ago last August. That was $187 million of debt repaid in the five years. Last, but certainly by no means least, we have an LTIFR, that's lost time injury frequency rate, for last year of 0.83, an improvement on the previous year, which was 1.69.
Just turning slides through to slide six, just to reemphasize what our strategy is and what drives CAML and our business. Our purpose is to produce metals, base metals that is, essential for modern living, profitably and in a safe and sustainable environment for all of our stakeholders. That informs our strategic objectives, certainly in the short term, to focus on sustainability and everything that we do to be sustainable. You can see the five pillars there, and we'll expand upon that more later. I think Gavin will prove that we target low cost, high margin operations when he goes through the finances. Finally, ensuring that the money that we make from those businesses, we allocate prudently, both for growing the business and developing the businesses in the two operations, as well as paying money back to our stakeholders.
Last, but by no means, and probably the largest challenge we have at the moment, is delivering growth of the business to expand upon the very strong baseline that we have. On that note, I'll hand over to Gavin, and we're moving on to the financial results in a little bit more detail. Gavin.
Thanks very much, Nigel. If we move on to slide eight, the market conditions. I'd like to emphasize there in the table on the bottom left is that the prices that we achieved year-over-year were only higher in the case of zinc. We actually got lower prices for copper and for lead during the year. Of course, CAML is not isolated from the inflation impacts that we've felt globally. In Kazakhstan, we had inflation of just over 20%, and in North Macedonia, around 14%. Energy markets in that bottom right-hand chart, quite stark there. We can see the brown line is what CAML achieved, or Sasa at least achieved, in terms of electricity prices, with it jumping around 4x in July 1st.
On average, we had around a 3.6x increase in that energy price through H2, which resulted in a $4.7 million increase in the electricity charges for the half. That sort of sets the scene, if we move on to the income statement in Slide three. As Nigel said, gross revenues of $232.2 million, only slightly off year-over-year. Cost of sales reflecting those inflationary pressures up 8%, which we think is a good result given the global inflationary environment. If we look at the breakdown of the cost of sales, primarily again due to that electricity price that we're seeing at Sasa, plus also some payroll costs coming through as we respond to those inflationary pre-pressures with pay rises for our staff on both sites.
Looking at the admin expenses up 13%, just wanna emphasize that the large proportion of that increase is non-cash and relates to share-based payments, which is the LTIP schemes that senior management and other staff participate in. Lower finance costs, as Nigel said, we've repaid our debt, so no longer paying high interest costs there. With the profit before tax decreasing as a result of an impairment, which I'll talk about later in more detail, down about 50%. On an adjusted basis, our EPS has actually gone up to 48.1%, sorry, $0.4815, up from $0.477 the previous year. We look at the segmental information, both assets have performed really well.
Kounrad revenue down slightly due to that copper price coming down, as I mentioned earlier, yet still achieving an EBITDA margin of 77%. Revenue at Sasa conversely up because zinc prices were up, higher costs coming through there as I've described. EBITDA margin therefore also down off from 56% on the previous year to 52% in 2022. We move on to that development of EBITDA year on year on slide four. 2021 EBITA $141.5 million. The two big impacts you can see in that chart, waterfall chart, dominated by the decrease in copper revenue, of $8.4 million and cost of sales going up around $9 million, resulting in that $131.6 million EBITA number at the end of the year.
Slide 11, if we look at the Kounrad cost base, as I mentioned previously, the main driver behind that cost increase is payroll. That translates into a $0.06 per pound increase. Pay rises were effective from January 1, 2022, but we're also seeing the full year impact of some mid-year increases that we gave staff there in 2021. Just to emphasize on those staff, what we've done is really pay the lower paid staff higher increases, whereas the higher paid staff got much smaller increases. Just to reflect, as I said, that inflationary pressure that we are seeing in Kazakhstan. You know, the margins that we're achieving there, 77%, you know, still one of the lowest cost copper producers in the world. Can we move on to slide six, please?
Looking at Sasa, slightly different story there. As I mentioned, you know, the big, big on-site cost increase is due to electricity costs, but also, we've reduced the tonnages coming through from 2021 to 2022, around about 12,000 tons less throughput, which drives the unit cost up a little bit. Other areas where we've seen increases are in reagents and grinding consumables. Those are things like, you know, consuming things like steel, copper, and a few other reagents there. Fuel costs, again, no surprise, those have gone up about $0.50 a ton, as well as we see global energy costs rising all over the place. Labor costs, again, went up to combat that inflation, but we are seeing some tailwinds from the currency that we're achieving there as well.
In effect, still a good EBITDA margin for Sasa at 52%. You can see another line, the second last line, we can see the realization costs actually coming down. Those are the treatment charges, the cost that the smelters charge in converting our concentrates into metal. Overall, a good result on each of the mines. We move on to slide 13, which is the CapEx. 2022 group CapEx was $17.4 million, up from $14.8 million on the prior year. That is primarily related to this cut-and-fill project, which we'll talk about in more detail later. Sustaining CapEx of $7.7 million at Sasa, is mainly to do with underground development and some upgrades to flotation equipment and replacement of some underground fleet.
Kounrad's sustaining CapEx is slightly higher than the usual $2 million that we guide there because we went through an anode replacement program, which is something that happens every three to four years, so nothing out of the ordinary there. CapEx fill project, as I mentioned, $7.2 million onto the balance sheet here, which is related to the paste backfill plant, which is $5.6 million. Underground reticulation, that's the pipework that we gonna use to emplace the paste fill back underground. The Central Decline, which is a new access into the ore body, $2.6 million spent there. Dry stack tailings, one of our new tailings facilities. Again, more detail to come, $1.8 million on that. I'm slightly below guidance.
That's because we've deferred a number of these costs into 2023. The sort of 2023 CapEx, we're still guiding at $28 million-$30 million on that basis. Slide 14 on the balance sheet. Actually, pretty good. Balance sheet's in good shape. As Nigel said, repaid all the debt borrowings of $1.4 million. As you can see, they relate to a small overdraft facility. Cash on the balance sheet at the end of the period, $60.3 million, leaving the company in very good shape. If we talk about that impairment for a minute, that is a result of a number of issues. One is global macroeconomic issues. We've spoken about the increased costs.
We've also seen risks increase around the world, and that impacts the discount rate that we apply when we do our impairments analysis. The discount rate's gone up to 12.52%. Last year, we used 10.21%. The life of mine study also feeds into this. What we've done is completely recalculated our reserves resources and therefore, and run a new life of mine schedule on top of that. The result of that is a 7.8% lower throughput from 900,000 tons per year to 830,000 tons a year. That's the forecast throughput we had at Sasa. Those three things in aggregate have led us to run that $55.1 million through the balance sheet as an impairment.
Just to reemphasize that that's non-cash and doesn't impact the cash flows of the business at all. Speaking of cash flows on slide 15, we see the development year-over-year there, $59.2 million in the bank. At the beginning of the year, cash generated from operations, $122.6 million. Dividends paid during the year, $48.2 million. Repaid that debt, the last $23.8 million going back to the lenders there. We've also paid taxes, expended that [$714.4] million that I described earlier, which leaves us with $60.6 million in the bank. Really good position.
That's allowed the board to announce that 10p dividend Nigel spoke about, that's off the basis of that free cash flow number of 89.7%. That dividend represents 47% of that free cash flow number, which is towards the top end of our 30%-50% range. On that note, I'll hand back to Nigel. We go to Louise.
No, we can-
Sorry, Louise.
I'll get it. Thanks, Simon. Yeah, I'll just give you a few highlights and I'll Sustainability efforts last year as well. On slide 17, if we can go, please. Just a couple of adjustments to our sustainability framework last year. Firstly, as we've mentioned to you before, we report to what's called the GRI standards, and their standards adjusted to what's called universal standards, which incorporated an adjusted approach to the stakeholder engagement based materiality assessment. We did that process last year. It's called double materiality, and it considers really the impact of the material topics on society, but also on economic factors related to our business as well. We reran our stakeholder-based materiality topic. You can see those highest and high priority topics on the slide.
There are some adjustments year-on-year, although albeit we're not comparing apples with apples, but it's interesting to point out that environmental compliance is new to our material topics and hazardous waste management, i.e. tailings, heat bleach, et cetera, has moved up the list. That's informed our sustainability reporting. Obviously, when we know our material topics, that's what we report on, and you'll see that in the forthcoming sustainability report, which we'll publish in Q2. The second thing in terms of the framework is we have revisited the UN Sustainable Development Goals that we believe we contribute to, and we felt confident to add another two to those, which is number 9, industry and innovation, and number 12, which is responsible production and consumption.
We've also mapped those quite carefully to our material topics and our long-term targets and acknowledged really that there's five of those that we believe we contribute to in a primary sense, and then three where we're more supporting towards those SDGs. We've adjusted our approach slightly to that as well. Moving on to slide 18, I'll just do a quick overview of the five key sustainability pillars that we have and that we report to. The first one being delivering value through stewardship, and that's looking towards the governance aspects of the business. We have three key work streams last year.
One was, we developed a whole new corporate governance training platform ourselves internally. We pushed through four courses that our employees have been through. We also started a new process where we were screening our suppliers for based on a social assessment. That information, the questions we asked, is available on our website. It covered things like child labor, human rights, minimum wages, those sorts of aspects. I think the third key piece of work that we undertook was to do a human rights due diligence assessment across our business as well. Going forward into this year, we're gonna be incorporating some environmental aspects into our supplier screening process. Also we're going to, we're gonna move forward with any recommendations that came through from the human rights review as well.
Moving on to slide 19, on health and safety. Obviously, this is a very important aspect for us. Nigel's already covered our LTIFR, and I think it's just important to know we've set ourselves a target last year to improve on an LTIFR of 1.69, and we did achieve that with our LTIFR of 0.83. On that basis, we have lowered our target this year going forward. As ever, good training is key to help our employees recognize potentially dangerous situations that they may put themselves in. We managed to deliver a 14% increase in our group health and safety training last year versus 2021. Going on to slide 20 and focusing on our people. There are a few key aspects that we have been focusing on.
Last year, there was a lot of effort put into building a really impressive training team as we transition our mining method towards the paste backfill mining method, which will incorporate some differences in practical mining at Sasa. That's been a big area of focus for us last year. Also, diversity. We're starting to try to push through some changes there. We've developed diversity and inclusion focus groups at both sites where we meet and discuss our objectives and what we can try to achieve because for the long term we've set ourselves a target of a 25% increase in female employees by 2025. We'll start to be, from this year onwards, our aim is to be interviewing at least 20% female interviewees for each eligible role going forwards.
Obviously, maintaining strong union relationships, is key for us as well. We've always been proud that we've had very strong local employment which is 100% local employment in Kazakhstan and 98% local employment at Sasa with only 12 expats at Sasa. Going on to slide 21. We've put a slide in now on its own in terms of our climate change progress. You'll recall we set ourselves a target of 50% reduction in our group Scope One and Scope Two greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 from a 2020 base.
The chart that you should be able to see on page 21 is a wonderful chart which highlights the progress we've made from the 98,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions that we produced in 2020, and that's now reduced by 40% in the two years to 58,000 tons in 2022. 50% of the initial 2020 greenhouse gas emissions would get you to 49,000 tons by our 2030 target.
I think key to getting us a large part of the way towards there is the Kounrad Solar Power Plant which we agreed to build in 2022, started building in Q4, 2022 and we're on track to complete that project by the end of this year. If we move on to slide 22, aside from the climate change work that we have undertaken, we've also had some other key focus areas in terms of looking after our environment. We undertook a Kounrad asset retirement obligation study with help from Golder as that piece of work done, and that's incorporated as well into our financials. We also were delighted to get our environmental, social, and impact assessment approved for the cut-and-fill project at Sasa.
That was a key achievement at Sasa for us last year, which paved the way for us to push ahead with the construction aspects at the site. This year we'll be moving forward to put a bit more emphasis onto our group biodiversity strategy. We have done several biodiversity studies at both of our sites in the past, but we're aiming this year to pull that together to a more group approach as to how we deal with biodiversity aspects. We'll also be finalizing our Sasa water management strategy.
In transitioning to the paste backfill mining approach, we'll start moving towards two of our key long-term targets, which is a 75% reduction in freshwater abstraction at Sasa by the end of 2026, and of course, 70% of our tailings to be stored in a more environmentally responsible manner by the end of 2026, and by that we mean underground in the paste backfill and in the dry stack tailings as well. Moving on to slide 23, unlocking value for communities. This covers various aspects. One is, I've already mentioned before, is local employment, which is key to creating value for communities. The other is local procurement as well, and we've put some stats in there. $54 million spent with local suppliers in North Macedonia, $11 million spent with local suppliers in Kazakhstan in 2022.
That really helps to develop value in the countries in which we operate. We also have our charitable foundations at both of the sites, and we're proud of the work that we do there trying to make positive changes to develop our communities. We made some improvements to the disabled daycare center in Sasa during the year. At Kounrad, we provided some significant financial support to a new children's rehabilitation center in Balkhash. We've also sponsored some tuition fees for medical students in the local area to try and keep newly trained doctors within the Balkhash region as well. There's a few bullet points at the bottom of the slide which we're particularly proud of what we've delivered from three projects which we have previously invested in.
One was a crisis center where last year we provided refuge for 42 adults and 36 children fleeing difficult domestic situations. We continued to support over 100 children with disabilities in the Kind Heart Center that we built and supported a couple of years ago, and also continued support for the Center for the Blind for 130 people last year as well. Going forward, we're looking to increase the amount of funding we put into our two foundations from 0.25% of revenue to 0.5% of revenue from 2023 going forward. That's my sustainability summary. I'm gonna hand back to Nigel to talk about the operations.
Thanks very much, Louise. Just before I do, just to say that shows how much focus we do put on sustainability aspects of the business, Gavin's already just alluded to the profitability of the business. I think this is just an expansion now of the operations that drive that profitability. Many of you on the call will be fully aware of the Kounrad operation. That's an aerial photograph you can see on slide 25. We now estimate we've got just over 5,000 tons of recoverable copper in the eastern dumps and about 106,000 tons of recoverable copper on the western dumps to actually produce to the end of the life of mine, which is 2034 in terms of license terms. Just turning over to slide 26.
Many of you again will have seen this chart before. It just shows our historical production on the right-hand side. Since 2016 now, we've been pretty steady between 13,000-14,000 tons. As I mentioned before, last year was actually a record year for us, 14,254 tons. We have optimized the output, and we expect to stay at those kind of levels before it slightly declines a little bit as we get towards the end of the license period. Eastern dumps and western dumps, slightly different as you can see on the left-hand side, estimating 45%-50% recovery on the east. In certain areas we've achieved more than that. On the western dumps, 35%-42%, where most of the copper is now coming from.
Around about 85% of our copper production is now on the western dumps as opposed to the eastern dumps. You can see the standard leach curve there in terms of how we recover the copper over a period of time, different for different cells and the east and the west. Slide 27, Louise mentioned we are constructing a solar power plant. It's quite small beer in terms of size. It's only 4.77 MW and will provide around about 16%-18% of our electrical requirements 'cause of our constraints in Kazakhstan in terms of the size of solar plant that you can build and then directly feed into your own plant. It's our attempt to actually improve our greenhouse gas emissions in Kazakhstan.
It's also been designed such that we can potentially increase the size of that solar plant in the future, should we, should we be able to and should we need to. The relevant cost of that is around about $5 million, and it will have a reduction on our greenhouse gas emissions in Kazakhstan by about 10% and I think around about 6% at group level. We expect that power plant to come on stream at the end of this year. Moving over finally on Kounrad, slide 28. I won't labor this too much, but we're coming up almost to 11 years of production now at Kounrad.
We celebrated 10 years last year, some interesting statistics in terms of the number of people we employ, the amount of revenue that we have generated in that 10 and a half year period, which is getting close to $1 billion. Something as a company we're very proud of because it's producing value effectively out of waste. Very low C1 cash cost. Over the life of that operation, it's around about $0.56 per pound. A few headwinds encountered over the last year that Gavin mentioned, but still a very low cost operation. 100% local employment, again, something we're very proud of. All the staff are locally sourced, if you like, and we've trained them up to actually run that plant with just a slight hand on the tiller from corporate level.
Also the establishment of the Kounrad Foundation, something we're proud of and some of the points that Louise mentioned there in terms of how we support the community in the local area. Moving along to Sasa, quite a lot of work's gone into Sasa. If I move to slide 30 now, just to emphasize where there's a shot there, you can see quite constrained area that Sasa operates in. Beautiful part of the world in North Macedonia. It's a skarn-hosted deposit. It's an underground mine, sub-level caving operation at the moment, but as many of you know, we are transitioning slowly through to a cut-and-fill mining and then a paste fill with long-hole stoping, which is something new that we're revealing on this call, I suppose.
Something that we've found through the work we've done over the course of the last year in updating our resources and our reserves and our life of mine thinking for Sasa, which has extended the life out to 2039. Slide 31 is just the production for last year. I've already mentioned the production numbers. Our guidance for this year is informed by as we go lower in the mine, we're getting slightly lower grades both on zinc and lead. We've got this year a guidance of 19,000-21,000 tons of zinc in concentrate and lead of 27,000-29,000 tons of lead in concentrate as we transition down through the mine.
You can see the histogram there showing pretty constant levels of output from the mine all the way back to 2010 ahead of our time of ownership. Just a few slides update on the transition projects as we're calling them. Slide 32, we started the Central Decline development back in 2021. We've now done almost 1.5 km both from the surface and the 910 level. We expect that to hole through in May of this year. We'll continue the decline further down below the 750 level. The total length of that decline will be 4 km.
As I think already previously mentioned, it will provide far more productive and efficient access into the lower reaches of the ore body, improve the ventilation and improve our productivity as we go through and into the lower levels of the mine. It's over a number of years that we'll be doing it, expecting to complete the whole decline by 2024 when the 4 km will have been effectively tunneled. Paste fill plant. Good process, good progress, sorry should I say on that. You can see some pictures. A picture paints 1,000 words. We started the actual construction on site in September and been working throughout the winter, more or less unimpeded by any kind of weather impacts. The roof panels are on, the cladding's on now. The building's more or less complete.
We are on track to start the dry commissioning side of that project in April and then into wet commissioning in May. The reticulation pipework, the pipework that basically takes the paste fill from the plant itself into the voids that we'll be filling when we start cut-and-fill mining, we're making good progress on that. That commenced in the second half of last year and is well on track for completion ahead of the plant commissioning, as I mentioned in May, and then into actual cut-and-fill mining in the second half of this year. I suppose the final part of the transition project is obviously dry stack. Slightly behind on that. We always planned it that way. We will start work on the groundwork and installing the plant in the second half of this year.
The design is being just adapted into North Macedonian format, something you have to do in all foreign jurisdictions to make sure it meets local regulatory approvals. Most of the major equipment has now been ordered and is on track to be delivered in the second half of this year, and then construction will start in the second half of this year, as I mentioned. Knight Piésold have worked very closely with us in understanding what the land form is for the detailed design in terms of where you actually stack the dry the cake, if you like, the tailings themselves. Which is probably more involved a project than we thought in the early days when we went down the life of mine review. We're well on track.
We understand that a lot better now and the construction will start in the second half of the year. Something which has been marginal is slide 35. Sorry, I'm onto now, is the Sasa reserves and resources. We've bolstered our technical team at the back end of 2021 and into 2022 with a group geologist, group technical services team at Sasa and used their skill set to review the actual mine planning, update the reserves and update the resources. As a consequence of that work, and you can see, the deeper drilling that we've done ahead of that work, really has informed us as to the nature of the ore body as we go lower, which is slightly lower grade and also slightly lower mining widths in some of the areas.
We've actually fed that all into standard modern software, should I say, which is Leapfrog for the resources modeling and also Deswik in terms of the mine planning and the reserve modeling, and got a very good robust model now of what the ore body is doing down at depth, which has informed us really in terms of our planning going into the future. We've incorporated rather than % grade cut-offs, NSR cut-offs because it's a polymetallic mine, which has also informed us. A number of changes have affected therefore the resource, which decreased by 1.2 million tons year-on-year.
That's partly depletion of around about 700,000 tons or 800,000 tons, and also adjustments onto geological reinterpretation of the data from the group geologists. That's been signed off by Graham, our group geologist, and that's fed into the Svinja Reka ore reserve, which has also slightly decreased. There's a number of movements on that, both positive and negative, to give it 0.7 million ton depletion. As I said, and you can see the tables on the right, we're confident we've got a very robust life of mine plan there. Informing that moving forward, and we've been fairly prudent on the outputs, and that has partly led to some of the impairment charge. We're planning now an 830,000 ton per annum outputs.
Also, we've got a detailed drilling program both this year and next year, and about 10,000 m of drilling at the three ore bodies that we have at Sasa. This is slide 36. Just to remind people, we have the Svinja Reka ore body, which is where we're currently operating. Then there's the Kozja Reka and the Golema Reka ore bodies close by, which have historically been mined, but whilst we've been the owners, we've not done any mining there. We've got a drill program, as I say, just in excess of 10,000 meters, both on surface and underground, to actually understand those ore bodies and feed into the life of mine plan in the future, which will potentially give some optimization. Slide 37, just to emphasize the first five years. We've now owned Sasa for just over five years.
Since acquiring it, the amount of CapEx we've spent on the asset to transition into this modern method of mining and this cut-and-fill mining, we generated revenue of around EBITDA, should I say, sorry, of $301.5 million. We've paid off all the debt, $187 million of debt that we took to acquire the asset in the first place. We've established good community relationships with the Sasa Foundation. I think established ourselves as an owner of that business and a long-term owner of the business, and established our credibility in country as a long-term owner of the mine.
We have 98% local employment at Sasa, and you can see the statistics there of how much zinc and lead we have produced, and also some of the statistics for revenue and how much tax we paid locally on slide 37. Just moving quickly to the end of the presentation many ways, but something, as I mentioned right at the beginning, which is important to CAML, which is how we allocate the capital, the cash that we generate from our projects in a sensible manner. You can see on slide 39 there that our returns to shareholders, I think we've always been known for good returns back to shareholders. We have just announced this morning a 10 p dividend.
For the second half of the year, which was a bit more challenging than first half of last year, that represented in excess of the 50% of the free cash flow generated in that second half. Overall, we felt it was a good decision to move to 47% for the full year, which is a 20 p full year dividend for 2022. We've now paid back nearly $300 million in dividends or 152 p per share since we started paying dividends back in 2012. Business development, obviously one of our main challenges really is to grow the business. There's not a lot of organic growth in both Sasa or Kounrad. A little bit maybe at Sasa, but not significant certainly for the business.
Where we're looking to grow is outside of those two operations. We have been active in that area. We continue to be active, and we're looking for the right opportunities. There's a pyramid chart there showing two site visits undertaken, 17 NDAs signed, and about 40 opportunities reviewed, but we've not yet found the one that we've made a decision to actually invest in at this stage. just finally moving on to slide 40. Slide 40, just to sum it out really, just to bring it all up and wrap it all up, to be honest with you. A strong, sustainable business. We believe we have that. We've got our capital allocation priorities right, both investing back into the business, giving money back to our shareholders, growing the treasury balance that we have and looking for that next opportunity.
Our outlook for this year is we expect metal prices to stay fairly stable. We've got good confidence in our guidance that I've already mentioned for the production of those metals. We are debt-free now, so we have debt capacity to look for opportunities. One of the challenges we have is completing the projects on-site at Sasa. Complete the Paste Backfill Plant , go through the commissioning stage, which I think as a management team is a riskier part of the stage, but we've got a good team in place to actually deliver on that and get through the commissioning. Complete all the initial phase of the Central Decline. Certainly as that holds through in May, that'll be an exciting moment for the company.
Also construct the Kounrad Solar Power Plant in Kazakhstan, start our transition over to this modern method, this paste-fill method of mining at Sasa. On that note, I think that's the end of the presentation. I'll hand it back to the team for any questions that you may have of the management team here at CAML.
Thank you. As if you'd like to ask a question on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star two. The first question comes from the line of Alexander Pearce. Please go ahead.
Great, thank you. Morning, all. My question's on the life of mine study at Sasa. You now model 830,000 tonnes versus obviously the potential for 900 before. It sounds like this is mine constrained. I just wonder whether you could provide any more detail on the likely throughput profile to get to the 830 from where you are now, given the transition to both cut-and-fill and long-hole stoping. Second part of that is do you have a rough split between those mining methods over the life of mine, so we can get a better idea of cost profile? Finally, do you think you're being relatively conservative overall with this 830?
Is there any potential for kind of incremental upside if you brought forward development of some of the other ore bodies, for example?
Okay. Good questions, Alex. Thank you, and good morning. I think the middle one in terms of split may have to come back to you in terms of if you're asking what's the split between long-hole stoping, cut-and-fill, and sub-level caving to give you an accurate answer. We have got the detail behind that, but I haven't got it immediately to mind. In terms of the constraints, I think when we initially did the life of mine review, I think it's fair to say that Scott and the team thought the main constraint we would have will be the plant and that if we invested in, you know, more flotation cells and another mill, potentially you could easily get to 900,000 tons.
I think having owned the mine now for five years, we've recognized the current processing plant is probably working flat out most days, and you've got to be careful you don't overexhaust it. I think that is still is a constraint, but I think it's something we could actually get up to 900,000 tons with the right trade-off study. I do think that the drilling and what we've come out with this morning in terms of life of mine study and the narrower mining widths lower down and informing us to go to long-hole stoping lower down in some of those widths where they become less than three and a half meters wide.
If you did cut-and-fill in those particular areas, you would have pretty high dilution, and not as good a recoveries, which again informs to go to long-hole stoping to maintain decent recoveries and minimize dilution. What it's informing us, I think, is that to get the number of headings you might require to get to 900,000 tons means is that mining is potentially a constraint. You've now got two constraints. I think prudently, we've said that, "Well, we could get to 830. We're confident. We've been at 830 in the past five years that we've owned the mine." I think we can get there. I think it's just a practical application of what we've learned over the past year to give a prudent life of mine plan.
In answer to your final part of the question, which are we being conservative? I think it's a realistic plan, personally. I think we may be conservative, but it will depend on what we find in the drilling program at Kozja Reka and Golema Reka. If we find, you know, suitable ore there, and we're hopeful that we will do, that would inform us to maybe consider how we would increase the mining throughput to 900. I think the plant's an easier decision, even though the footprint is a little bit constrained. It's that, as you know, from having visited the mine, Alex. But I think that's doable. We have a basic outline plan as to flotation cells and mills that we could do that with.
As, as you know, on a mine, there's a lot of moving parts, and we need to think about all aspects of it, really, to get a decent plan. I hope that answers your question. Okay. We'll come back to you on the split unless Gavin or Louise have those statistics right at the top of their head. Great. Thank you.
The next question comes from Richard Hatch. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, Nigel and team. Thanks for the call. Just a question. I mean, just listening, looking at the reading through the impairment stuff, I mean, you've cut your long-term lead price by nearly 10%, real. I'm just kind of thinking, like, you know, with the way that prices have gone, cost curve inflation and such like, it feels like the direction of the market is actually increasing the long-term price because you've got to take into account the higher cost of production. If you do decide at some point to increase your long-term prices to account for that sort of theme, is there scope for the impairment to extent be written back upwards?
I guess not the goodwill part, but the other element to it or not?
Yeah, I'll take that, Richard. Hi. Yeah. What you gotta consider here is that the impairment is run as a snapshot in time as of December 31st. Therefore, we use the consensus prices as of that date, no matter what our personal outlooks might be. Frankly, I think the people around this table probably agree with you. And as you know, the consensus prices at that point were lagging spot by quite a substantial margin. You know, we were stuck with using those prices. To your point, as if in future any of those metrics that drove that impairment do change, there is an opportunity to sort of write it back, if you like. It's, you know, whether or not we elect to do that at the time is another story.
I think on the last point, Richard, personally, as an accountant, I wouldn't wanna see us write it back. I'd rather have the balance sheet written down and just.
Yeah.
Accept the business runs off its cash flow and its performance, you know, its operating performance, really. I think, 'cause I think it is a technical matter.
Yeah.
If you were to look at the impairment review they did, they hardly did any work on Kounrad because there's such a large margin between the book value now at Kounrad and what the cash flows predict. I'd rather create that kind of distance at Sasa as well and not have to keep revisiting this. What we know is always a debate between an analyst, a management team, and a banker in terms of consensus prices and what prices are valid prices. That Gavin's quite right. I would view consensus as being fairly prudent given what's happening in the world at the moment and the cost inflation we're experiencing. If you put higher commodity prices, clearly it doesn't lead to an impairment.
I think the other thing is the discount rate, you know, that's probably a higher discount rate than many of us would feel having owned Sasa now for five years and establishing ourselves in the country. It's a bit perverse that you use a high discount rate. We mustn't, you know, we mustn't complain too much. The auditors have a role to play and it was a bit marginal, therefore we've impaired it. I don't think it affects the performance of the business at all, and I wouldn't wanna yo-yo back to something that brought me carrying value and cash flows back again. I've got to take another impairment, another... You remember when we bought the other percentage stake in Kounrad, which I don't know if you remember back to this.
We had a fair value uplift, which is a hell of a thing to try and explain, but it didn't really impact what people's view of the business was in any shape or form because the business is the business and how it performs and its, you know, financial performance and cash flows, really.
Yeah. Okay. Understood. Thank you. Appreciate the color. Gavin, while I've got you just on the working capital, another build in receivables, but revenues were broadly flat. Year-on-year. Is there any kind of timing element to that? Should we expect to see a bit of a drift back of cash into the H1 cash flow on a working capital standpoint or not?
I think a lot of that working capital, Bill, Richard, is actually due to prepayments for the cut-and-fill project. It's about $4.7 million of that is prepayments that gets booked in there rather than deferred. Yeah. Just so we're not, we're not necessarily waiting for revenue.
Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, I see there's a comment in here about VOD as well.
Yeah.
Okay, cool. Then just a last question is just on that, on that run rate up to 830, what is the kind of the timeframe to which you're kind of considering, running the plant up to 830?
Mm-hmm.
I guess if your impairment model, you're running it at $8.30 long term. When, when do you get there?
We should be there next year I would have thought, Richard. 'Cause most of the infrastructure will be done, and we'll be moving to cut-and-fill. I think, you know, we've had a couple of years where we've been less than 830 as you've seen on the five-year production profile. We're aiming to get back there as soon as possible really once we've got the plant up and running and we've got the transition covered.
Okay. Very helpful. All right. Thanks for your time. Much appreciated. Cheers.
Okay. Thanks, Richard.
There are no further questions in the queue at the moment. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one. The next question comes from the line of Peter Mallin-Jones. Please go ahead.
Morning, everyone. Thanks for the results. I was wondering if I might follow up on Alex's question around the life and mine plan. I hear you mention that you may look to expand the plant and add a mill and so forth in if the sort of drilling at Kozja Reka and Golema Reka comes through and allows you to open up mining in those zones. I was wondering if you can give us a sense of when that you may get to the point of those results being in and being able to take that sort of decision.
Good question, Peter. I mean, we started the drilling on the Kozja Reka. We started that in February, and we'll start the drilling on the Golema Reka in April. I would hope the latter part of this year will inform us as to, you know, the drill results effectively from assays and everything else that comes back. In terms of doing the trade-off study, again, I would have thought it'd be latter part of this year, maybe into early next year when 'cause we've got enough on our plates doing the actual infrastructure and building the plant really. It is something that we have in mind to have a look at.
Okay. It would be something that once the cut-and-fill transition is sort of bedding down and you've got the majority of the mine moved over in the areas where you're gonna move it over, then that creates bandwidth at site to start looking at potential expansions towards the 900.
Yeah.
Without stressing over the mine or the plant.
Yeah. Effective. I, you know, wouldn't like to be too hard and fast of an actual specific day we've got in mind to do that trade-off study. I think, you know, it's something we will be looking at in the future. Yeah.
I think the trade-off study will lean more towards the sort of adjustments in the mine plan and how we get those tons out the ground. You recall from previous presentations, we have guided that we can expand that plant for minimal CapEx. There is certainly, you know, it's not like we're putting a whole new line in. It's a few flow cells and some stuff on the front end, as Nigel was saying. It's not a huge drama on the plant side.
Understood. Thank you.
Thanks, Peter.
The next question comes from the line of Marina Calero. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for the call. I did have a question about Sasa. Can you give us a bit more color about the CapEx profile after 2023? I was just wondering if including long-hole stoping changes your CapEx outlook in the medium term. Thank you.
I think the question is.
Yeah.
long-hole stoping change the CapEx outlook.
No, I think we typically guide to $8 million-$10 million of sustaining CapEx per year.
It does take a specific drill rig for it, which, you know.
Yeah.
Will be a bit of CapEx, but I think it will all be accommodated, if I'm honest with you, Marina, in the sustaining CapEx moving forward.
Yeah. Yeah.
We replace the fleet and buy new, you know, driller rigs and trucks and loaders every year, that's all factored into that sustaining CapEx.
Yeah.
I think in terms of the profile, in terms of the sustaining CapEx, as the guys say, it's gonna stay at that sort of $8 million-$10 million run rate that we've been guiding for the last few years. In terms of project CapEx, probably looking at between $10 million and $12 million sort of this year and then maybe a little bit, you know, a little bit more next year on the, on the project, but nothing to that sort of level.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. One more question on Kounrad, if I may.
Yeah.
How many more years you think you will be able to sustain, production run rate of 13,000 tons-14,000 tons?
Yeah, good question. I mean, we're what? 2023 now. We've got a life mine that's 2054. I certainly think we can keep for the next five, six years. As, as we've openly stated in the presentation, the recoverable copper, I'm just trying to find the page, was about under 11,000, I think was the number we quote there. Now, that's not an exact number, Marina, in all honesty. You could divide that by the number of years, and you get slightly less than 13,000. It will tail off towards the end. We do work hard to try and be creative on the dumps to try and extract more than what we plan for. We do theoretically plan for only a maximum of 50% at the east and a maximum of 42% on some of the western dumps.
I suspect, hopefully, and it is a bit of, you know, hopefully, we will extract more than that from some of those dumps, and therefore we'll be able to extend it. I wouldn't like to commit to say if it'll keep it at 13,000 right through to 2034. Our best estimate at the moment is the under 11,600 tons from recoverable copper. I would suspect and hope that we actually beat that. The license ends 2034. I think there'd be every chance that we could extend that license, but we wouldn't be operating to the same level of output that we currently are.
That's helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Okay.
There are no further questions. I'll hand back to the speakers to conclude today's conference.
Okay. Well, thank you very much for everybody attending. Appreciate your time. Hopefully, that's been a good insight into our results for last year and what we are facing as challenges and things that we need to do this year to deliver. We'll happily take any calls outside of this particular call through any of the contact numbers that are on the presentation. Please feel free to call us, and we'll happily talk through some of the issues if you've got any other issues.