Astral Resources NL (ASX:AAR)
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Apr 28, 2026, 4:10 PM AEST
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Noosa Mining Investor Conference

Jul 25, 2025

Marc Ducler
Managing Director, Astral Resources

Thank you for that introduction. We are a gold exploration and development company, and our assets are in W.A. This story is very simple. The project is compelling, and absolutely, so are the financials. Now, given this is the third day, and I'm in the last session of this three-day conference, I will try to just start with a 30-second elevator pitch. 1.8 million ounces in resource, three emerging hubs. The new ounces, 1.5 million ounces of them, have been added at less than AUD 20 an ounce in discovery cost. We have 1.1 million ounces in reserve. The pre-feas, which we put out last month, show that this project has over a 100% internal rate of return, a one-year payback, and a net present value of AUD 1.4 billion when you're using a gold price of AUD 4,250 an ounce. It is over AUD 5,000 an ounce today.

We are now working on the DFS, and we are still drilling. There is an RC rig drilling at the moment. There's a second one on its way, and we expect to continue to grow our resources at sub-AUD 20 an ounce in discovery cost. From a corporate perspective, we're on a pretty strong financial footing. There's over AUD 22 million in the bank. There's also the potential to bring another AUD 6 million worth of options in. They strike at AUD 0.14, and they're expiring in October. Certainly no rush for additional capital. Over the last 12 months, this company has progressed from a stock that was largely retail to one that now has about 23% institutional holding. That register is now stronger for that change, and we certainly have some pretty good research reports out from the brokers that are supporting us at the moment.

Just so everyone can understand where we are geographically, those three projects: Feysville is right near Kalgoorlie, then we've got Mandilla and Spargoville, they're 70 km from Kal. This is the heart of the Kalgoorlie gold fields. It's an area that has portable water, gas pipelines, grid power, mining camps, airports, and pretty much every W.A. mining and mining maintenance contractor has a presence in this region. This community lives off the back of mining, it supports new mine developments, and we are confident that we have a relatively smooth pathway through to permitting. The pre-feas have demonstrated that we are approaching a multi-decade mine. It's producing 95,000 oz per annum for the first 12 years, and as I said, it has a very strong set of financials.

I've actually been doing a bit of traveling recently, so between Australia, North America, Europe, and into Asia, I've probably spoken to over 75 institutional groups. Some of those funds that I'm meeting for the first time are asking where this project came from. I thought I'd just put this timeline out here. The research that we've got indicated that they found a soil geochem around Mandilla in 1988, and that sort of identified what was to become the Paleochannel deposit, and then Theia and Hestia. In 1989, WMC actually drilled some holes. They found the Paleochannel in 1989, and then they probably drilled the discovery hole for Theia in 1990. Post that discovery, WMC ended up getting quite busy with high-grade nickel and gold around Lake Lefroy, so the project was put on the back burner. We came along in 2003 and bought these Mandilla tenements.

It was the precursor to Astral Resources. The company's called Anglo-Australian back then. They bought the tenements for just under AUD 0.5 million with a view to drilling and mining out the Paleochannel, which they did. The actual Mandilla Paleochannel was 20,000 oz at 7-ish grams per ton. Again, Mandilla was actually put on the back burner, and it wasn't until 2019 where they, as a company, we reinterpreted the data and realized that there was actually quite a large, low-grade, bulk tonnage operation that was possible. Us as a management team, we joined in 2020, set about recapitalizing the company. We had to extinguish a royalty, which was actually offensively ugly. You can sort of see the details of that royalty there in 2020. We got rid of that, and then we got busy growing the [Joelt] resources.

We've gone from zero ounces to 1.4 million ounces, and then across our three projects up to 1.8 million ounces. That is the story of Mandilla. Now, with the whole, the old real estate adage of location, location, location, it is actually worth reiterating just how special this area is. To find a large-scale open pit from near surface in the heart of the Kalgoorlie gold fields, a processing plant, mine offices, workshops, heavy vehicle go bays, they are all planned to be located only 500 m from the highway. This Coolgardie-Esperance Highway actually joins the eastern states of Australia to Perth. We are certainly not remote. Located 25 km from the town of Kambalda, which has recreational facilities, a 50-m Olympic swimming pool, it's got a Woolworths, and a 320-man camp that's only got 70 people currently housed in it.

We are exceptionally fortunate in terms of where our assets are located. As I mentioned, nearly every significant mining and maintenance contractor has a presence in this region. This certainly makes for a lower cost and lower risk mine development. Here we go. The high level for the pre-feasibility study: 95,000 oz per annum, 1.1 g per ton. We do another six and a half years where we're treating low grade, and even during that period, we're still producing 40,000 oz per annum treating material that we've stockpiled for the previous 12 years. The all-in sustaining costs are under AUD 2,100 an ounce, and that is actually very competitive compared to our competitor peer group that has recently put out studies over the last month. Peak negative cash flow is AUD 227 million. Our market cap is over AUD 230 million today, so very much a fundable development.

That's AUD 180 million for the process plant and the non-process infrastructure, and AUD 47 million for our pre-production mining. This is a simple, large-scale open pit development at a five and a half to one strip ratio. As I said, these financials are incredibly robust at a AUD 4,250 gold price, a AUD 1.4 billion NPV, AUD 2.8 billion in free cash flow. We're paying this back in one year, and as I said, the internal rate of return is over 100%. If you plug the numbers in at spot, it obviously gets a lot stronger than that again. Spreadsheet mining is the easiest thing you can do. When you put out a pre-feasibility study, it always looks really, really good. There are a lot of de-risking things you need to do to be confident of your ability to deliver that project.

One of those key risks we had is we actually lacked the available tenure to develop our project. We've dealt with that by completing a transaction for a company called Maximus Resources that was completed in May of this year. That additional tenure has allowed us to design what is effectively very cost-effective from a waste landform perspective. We were able to justify that transaction just on the basis that we were designing the most optimum infrastructure layout. It actually saves us way more than what the actual transaction cost. As a bonus, almost like a set of steak knives, we got 139,000 oz thrown in for free and 144 sq km of prospective tenure that we are actually drilling as we speak. Resources, we updated the resources for Mandilla in April this year. By early May, when we'd completed the transaction for Maximus, we actually restarted their resources.

We cut them down from 335,000 oz to 139,000 oz. We're actually reasonably conservative with how we deem something that meets the reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction, which is what you need to pass under JORC 2012. Our group resources now stand at 1.8 million ounces. We have a history of growing organically at under AUD 20 an ounce in discovery cost. Mandilla, which is our flagship project, those 1.4 million ounces, we've added at AUD 18 an ounce in discovery costs. Currently, our resources there are stated inside a pit shell that is defined by a AUD 3,500 gold price, and we're using the pre-feasibility mining and processing costs to actually drive that optimization. When we released the pre-feasibility study, we've demonstrated that 95% of our ounces at Mandilla converted into a production target and 86% of the feasible ounces also converted.

The maiden probable reserve converted 92% of the indicated ounces into a probable reserve. These ounces convert at an extremely high rate, and they are very, very valuable. Just two slides on Mandilla. It's hosted within a granite intrusion. You've got this shear called the Karramindie Shear. As that shear runs through our tenement, there's a flexure in the shear, and it just provides a really good classical target for gold. We've got four deposits: Theia, Hestia, Eos, and Iris. Two kilometers to the west of us, we have the Wattle Dam Gold Mine, which now belongs within our tenement package. That was the highest grade gold mine in Australia when Ramelius mined it up to 2013. It was 210,000 oz at 14 grams per ton. Twenty kilometers to our east, we have the St Ives Gold Camp, 20 million ounces.

This is a prolific region for gold, and it is likely to continue to yield more ounces, and we aim to find those ounces with our current exploration programs. Here's a long projection of Theia from the recent mineral resource update. The most recent diamond drilling we did, we actually achieved an average of 400 g meters across those four holes. The last hole we drilled was 1,000 g meters, so it was a successful program. What it's also showing is we have some high grades that are potentially hosted within shears that could well be responsible for introducing the bulk of the mineralization at Theia. Two and a half meters at 170 g per ton, 10 me at 28, 25 m at 4. There is certainly more high-grade gold that we plan on targeting, and to that end, we've got a 3,000-m diamond program starting in September on that.

The probable reserve for this deposit is 829,000 oz, and again, just harping on this conversion rate, we converted 99% of those indicated ounces into a probable reserve. There's a 10,000-m infill program that we'll be starting, which is looking at the gaps of the stage one deposit in Theia, and what we're trying to do there is drill that out to 12 by 12 to make ourselves comfortable that as we go to mining, this mineral resource will deliver what we expect. Finally, on this slide here, this is the only plus one million ounce deposit in our region from an open pit perspective that still belongs to a junior. You've got Evolution, you've got Gold Fields, you've got Northern Star in this region, and the only two deposits that are bigger are the Super Pit and Red Hill, both of which belong to Northern Star.

This is a rare beast, and it is very valuable. Now, just moving on to Feysville. Feysville for us has always been about finding high-grade ore and being able to use that high-grade ore to displace the lower grade from Mandilla and push it into the process plant early that drives the net present value. This tenement package, 14 kilometers from Kalgoorlie, we've got 200,000 oz at 1.2 grams per ton here. Kamperman, reasonably recent discovery, we've drilled that out to 84,000 oz, and we expect that to continue to grow with another diamond program starting there later this year. My Exploration Manager attended this conference in November last year, and back then, we were talking about the fact that we believed Feysville could deliver 75,000 oz- 100,000 ounces at 1.1 g- 1.3 g per ton. That was one of the statements we made here last year.

It's actually delivered 130,000 oz at 1.1 g. We pride ourselves on not talking too much from our hope perspective, but let's talk from a reality perspective. The statements we make, they are P90 statements. We are confident we can make these statements, and we're confident that in all the statements I've made here today. There's a regional program currently at Spargoville. As that wraps up, that regional RC will start moving to Feysville. We'll do, I think, 7,000 m between Kamperman and regional drilling across our Feysville tenement package. Just looking ahead, we've done over 9,500 m of RC drilling. That's across Feysville, Iris, and Hestia at Mandilla, and those results are due out shortly.

To be honest, I'm actually the bottleneck, and I'm the reason that those results are late out to market, spending too much time talking to funds around, institutional funds around how we develop this project going forward. Currently, we've got a 10,000-m program running at Spargoville, and as I said, we've got 30,000 m planned at Theia, as well as 7,000 m planned across Feysville. We are committed to delivering the DFS, and we should be electing our DFS engineering partner by the end of August, and our timeline is to deliver this by 30th of June next year . Permitting for Mandilla, we've got one more spring survey to do, and then we'll be dropping those permits in the December quarter of this year. Native title for Feysville, we are well advanced, and we should be able to execute a native title agreement for Feysville in this current quarter.

In terms of our timetable to first gold, it is aggressive. It is about delivering the DFS, hitting a financial investment decision within a month of delivering that DFS, and then hitting the ground with construction. That's how we'll get to gold in the December quarter of 2027. Just to finish off, we are well funded. The pre-fees, we delivered it on time, and we delivered it within the guidance that we led to the market. We will deliver this DFS in the June quarter of 2026, and we are funded to achieve that. We will continue to drill. We are aiming to replicate that past performance of adding ounces at sub-AUD 20/oz discovery cost. We remain focused on de-risking Mandilla. The institutionalization of the register was important. The Maximus transaction was important.

The soon-to-commence grade control at Theia are all important steps to increase the certainty that we will be successful in our mine development. Our projects are arguably in one of the best jurisdictions in the world. It's infrastructure rich. It has strong community and local government support. We can navigate the regulatory framework to get our project up and running. It's conventional mining. It is conventional processing. The pre-feasibility study shows that Mandilla prints a lot of cash. AUD 2.8 billion at a AUD 4,250 gold price, AUD 3.9 billion if you're using a AUD 5,000 gold price. This is a profitable project. Our development timeline is aggressive, and it sees us to first gold in the December quarter of 2027. Thank you very much.

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