Alkane Resources Ltd (ASX:ALK)
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Sep 17, 2026, 10:00 AM AEST
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Diggers & Dealers Mining Forum 2026

Aug 4, 2026

Summary

Achieved record production and cash generation following a major merger, with strong liquidity and the first dividend in 45 years. Focused on expanding production through new deposits, asset development, and a major growth project, while maintaining a track record of operational delivery.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Tim, and good day, everyone. For those watching online, the auditorium is completely packed. This is probably the highlight speech. Not since Joe Hockey has there been such a crowd here at Diggers. It's wonderful to see you all again, and it's also wonderful to have crossed 30 years experience. I remember when I started as a graduate thinking how old everybody was, and now I'm this age and I like to reflect, this might even be like 30 lots of one-year experience rather than 30 years continuous experience. It's funny to be at that age and stage. It's great to tell you about Alkane Resources and our disclaimers are online. We now have more disclaimers than a Hollywood prenup. It's going to take you a while to read through it, but it's available online if you want to go through it.

Last year at Diggers, what did I say? I said, at Diggers, I present on the 6th of August, and it was the day after we'd finally completed our merger with Mandalay. I said, "Hey, we've just merged with Mandalay." I said, "We're going to produce over 160,000 ounce equivalent," because we produce gold and antimony in financial year 2026, which has just finished. I said, "We're going to generate a lot of cash." I said, "We're going to have increased share trading liquidity," and I said, "We should enter the S&P/ASX 300." How did we go? Well, happily, which is not always the case when you do a commercial transaction, we successfully completed the merger. We actually did 168,000 ounce equivalent across the last 12 months. That was great. Strong cash generation helped by fantastic tailwinds, particularly in that March quarter.

We increased our cash from AUD 190 million to AUD 432 million. We're now debt-free. We've got over AUD 500 million in liquidity, and we also announced that we had a proposed dividend. We'll have the full details of that when we put out our audited accounts in the 21st of August of AUD 0.02 a share, fully franked. For those that don't want to celebrate that as much as me, we have been listed on the ASX since 1981, and that's our first dividend in 45 years. We're actually planning to keep going with that process. Those that are thinking, "Oh, you know I'm going to have to wait another 45 years for another AUD 0.02," that's not correct. That's not correct. We intend to keep that. We also have other capital return considerations, buybacks and other things. We're starting with the dividend and seeing how that goes.

Significantly increased share trading liquidity. We're nearly 7.5 million shares daily across the ASX and TSX combined. We're still listed on the TSX. Not only did we go into the ASX 300, we went into ASX 200. Red letter day for us. Really, really good, and it's always a relief to be able to come and say something and then have it turn out the way that you want. I've got a little bit more about us saying things and them turning out they want coming up in this presentation. Where does that end us up? What's our current status? We're at three operating mines. Tomingley, which is, you can see there on the map, a bit west of Sydney. We did 83,000 ounces there. We have Costerfield, Victoria. We did 45,000 ounce equivalent there, gold and antimony.

I'll go into all these assets and where we're going much further later in the presentation. We have Björkdal in Sweden, where we did 41,000 ounces. I'm going to particularly focus in this presentation on Costerfield and Björkdal as I introduce them more and more to people. We ended up roughly our market cap is rocking and rolling at around this sort of AUD 1.8 billion at the moment. Hit a 12-month high in those lofty days pre everything. Before we won the Iran war 20 times, we were AUD 1.89. Cash and bullion, as I said, very, very strong. A lot of coverage that you can check out. Let's dive into a little bit more about our history and where we're going. Where are we going first? This is our next year's guidance.

We're going to do somewhere similar to what we did this year, 163,000-177,000 ounce equivalent at or around that AUD 3,000 per equivalent ounce all-in sustaining cost. We're spending, and I'll detail where this is going, circa AUD 60 million, all these are Australian dollars, on exploration. Our CapEx, which I'll go into a fair bit of detail on, and we've got a lot more of that coming out when we put out the annual accounts, is around this AUD 160 million-AUD 190 million. What next year, talking at Diggers, what we would very much like to be talking about is that we've discovered a new deposit at Tomingley. That's always the tricky bit with exploration because we're chasing a larger deposit there. We've finished our highway diversion and finally starting the open cuts at Tomingley. We've got 200,000 ounces in open cut there coming online.

That we've discovered something, and we've developed this new deposit, Brunswick South, which I'm going to talk about at Costerfield. That we've got our new open cut humming. We've increased our tailings, and we've developed to a new mining area at Björkdal. I'm going to talk about that. That we've progressed our Boda Kaiser environmental studies. I'll talk you through that timeline. Also that we've continued to act on inorganic opportunities as they emerge, and I'll talk about that. We're still very keen to continue to expand the business and happy to grab anyone and debate the merits of that outside. The other thing I want to point out, which we're pretty proud of, is we have a history of delivery.

Everybody here involved in operations knows how hard it is to pick a target and then meet that target, trying both to be realistic about it and then balance the risks and rewards. We have a history. This is the last 10-11 years of meeting our guidance in production, and we intend to continue to do so. When we say we're going to do 170,000 ounces, statistics say we will get 170,000 ounces, and ditto for our project delivery and other things like that. I think that's really important to focus on. Maybe there's not that many producers out there. Instead, we just have cynical analysts and brokers, in which case, wow, isn't that amazing. Kudos. Thank you, guys. I really want to stress that because it's so easy to get bogged down into the things that go wrong within our industry.

Let me talk to you a little bit about our assets. Tomingley, it's a highway diversion we're doing. Look, Tomingley, we mine mill about 1.3 million tons from underground, owner/operator. The big thing we're doing is that picture you can see in the top right, we're diverting that highway, and we have two new open cuts starting in the middle of that. That we expect to finish in April, that highway move. We expect to start those open cuts in the middle of next year, just before we are right back at Diggers next year. We continue to explore for regional targets. What we really want to see here, which we have not yet discovered, we've got plenty of things that keep extending a year or two. We've got eight years ahead of us. We're really looking for the next half-million-ounce discovery.

We're putting quite a bit of money into exploration here next year. This is our backbone of the business, is this, doing 80+ thousand ounces. But Costerfield down in Victoria, I have another slide coming up after this one. Here we do 140,000, 150,000 tons milled, very high grades. We still continue until Larvotto ramps up, and they're just commissioning. I put out that announcement today saying they started commissioning. We're still the largest antimony producer in the West. They will overtake us once they ramp up. We're doing an earn-in with Nagambie, 40 km away. This is all to expand the mineral inventory here with a view to, number one, extending the mine life, and number two, expanding that production so that we can increase beyond the 45,000 ounces.

Barring drilling like a Swan Zone, et cetera, at Fosterville, we consider success here to be somewhere in the 50,000 to 60,000-ounce range. Lending itself towards that success, this is the kind of thing. Just a couple of weeks ago, we put out this drilling in Brunswick South. You can't really see that picture on the right, but it's comprised of the assays that you can read on the left. This is very typical of the vein structure that we see here at Costerfield. You can see these very, very high grades. Typically, a percent of antimony is a couple of grams per ton of gold in a typical equivalence basis. We have these very, very high-grade structure. That's actually looking along vein, that structure. We have existing deposit about 250 meters. We are developing to that at the moment.

This is part of our capital spend this year, and we'll be mining this vertically within these 12 months. It's always nice to put some visible gold up on a slide. This is one of the sites where you can absolutely do that. This circuit starts with a gravity gold, and that gravity gold, about 70% of our gold goes into a gravity gold concentrate of 50% gold. This is an area that we're spending tens of millions of dollars developing to right now, and this is an area that is open for us in a number of directions. In the very left of that picture, you can see a diagonal pink line, which we call Brunswick West target.

We have a habit of naming things in directions that you get confused even when you're underground as to which direction it is because they're not strictly north, south, east, and west. They tend to be orientated as to where the geologist was standing on the day. We have Brunswick West target, again, where we're looking for this. The message I want to give you here is Costerfield has been running since 2009 with a four-odd year mine life. We've already extended another year, and now we're going into a whole new area where we have very, very high grades in the vein structure. We're very happy with the future we have at Costerfield, but we continue to look for the multi-hundred-thousand-ounce deposit there as well.

If I then go to Sweden, Björkdal in Sweden, I've got quite a few comments to make about Sweden as a place to invest, and I guess this really does extend to Norway and Finland as well. This was an open-cut mine that started in the 1980s. It's been underground for better part of a decade. I'm going to talk to you about the extension that we're putting money into in capital, this mine we call Storheden. The thing I want to talk about Sweden that people don't get is I get asked quite a lot of questions around, because we have assets in Victoria, New South Wales, and Sweden, and a lot of people are like, "Oh, wow, they sound like difficult jurisdictions to operate in." Well, it's true. They are first-world jurisdictions, and they have strong environmental laws and regulations.

Sweden, if you look at productivity per people unit on a dollar basis, is more productive per dollar than Australia. The corporate tax regime there is 21%, the gold royalty there is 0.25%, and power is around AUD 0.05 per kWh . That's a very attractive jurisdiction, I think, particularly when you compare it to other Australian jurisdictions. It's hydropower, so it's already green gold. Get on board. Yeah, this is what I really want to encourage you about, is that's why I think we're seeing a resurgence in these Nordic regions. The exciting thing for us, we do 41,000 ounces here. We intend to move much closer to 50,000 ounces over the next two years and beyond 50,000 ounces year after. A big part of that is our Storheden resource, which we put out just a couple of weeks ago.

This is 700 meters from the existing mine. You've got both looking at both in plan and section. If you look at the section- That's 700 meters laterally across. If you look at the plan, if we look slightly I don't really know. No, that's not going to work. If you look to the right-hand side of that picture, that's where we have a new open cut starting, Neelans. That's coming online to help lower the cost. Storheden, and you can see the very, very high grades there. When we put the grades in the resource, that's diluted to a two-and-a-half meter mining width. These are vein swarms that we mine out at two and a half meters. Obviously, if the geology is bigger, we dilute it further out. You can see the grade here is higher than our existing mine grade.

We typically mine about 1.4 grams per from underground. We also currently mine about 400,000 tons a year of surface stockpiles at 0.5. You can see that substituting this new mine for that is why I say that we'll go beyond 50,000 ounces. Some fantastic results here. You can see these really high grades. How does it end up being 2.5? Of course, it's being diluted down. It's a vein swarm system that we mine at 2.5 meters minimum width. This is a very, very exciting place for us, and that's why people see us allocating capital to it. Boda Kaiser, it's an incredibly large resource that runs at just under 0.6 grams per ton equivalent. We've drilled this out. We've got 260 odd kilometers of drilling. 65% of this is indicated.

This is a scoping study we did back in 2024 at 2024 prices. Given the current prices, you can see that this is economic. It's a large, low-grade, porphyry deposit. If we look at this timeline, this is what we're working on. Everybody here knows there's a big difference between having a fantastic resource and having a fantastic permitted resource that you can actually mine. The first one gets you excitement until the reality of the second kicks in. This will be our fourth major approval that we've done in New South Wales in the last 13 years. You can see that we're well embedded in the different studies and negotiations with landholders and infrastructure and water and all the other things that you're doing. We intend, by the end of next year, to put in our project application to the New South Wales government.

That typically takes a one to two year process. We've all now got the federal EPA and all that sort of stuff, there's all these other different things to work through. We will take that to BFS level. I don't want to spend the AUD 30 odd million going to bankable level until I get a pretty clear indication out of the government that we're going to be allowed to progress the project. We will look at fit for purpose and all the other things that you get. We expect that we'll be going for an FID sometime during calendar 2029 with a view to that sort of 2-2.5 year construction through that 2031-2032 period. You could even say that we aspire to add 200,000 ounces within five years.

That would make us a 400,000 ounce producer when this comes online. We have the resource. We have a track record of project approval. We have a track record of financing, yeah, it's certainly a bit of a sleeping giant for us. Absolutely, we look forward to continuing to show people what we do in that space. This is the unglamorous part of building future production. It's absolutely going to add value because the NPV of that, if you do the numbers, is very, very high. To any potential or actual investors watching this, probably 6,000 or 7,000 in the auditorium, but there'd be well more than that online. Why own Alkane? I think the number one thing I want to leave you with is we deliver on our production, and we look really well ahead.

One of the reasons in Australia or any tier 1 jurisdiction, in order to have reserves that go out beyond four, five, six years, is not just so you can say, "Hey, look at this. Here's my NPV." You know where you're going to put infrastructure. You know if you have to buy a property. You know if you need more water. You know if you have to negotiate with government or traditional owners or other people. That's what we do. We look very, very long way ahead of our business. We're familiar with and operate both underground and open cut mining teams, and we're an owner-operator business. We keep that margin for ourselves. We continue to expand the mineral resources at all three mine sites. We deliver growth projects.

When we look at either merger acquisition and/or our own internal delivery, we are very comfortable in that space. The most important thing I want to leave you with is we have a history of progressing permitting. We have a history of taking on that effort, doing those negotiations, and delivering a result. Obviously, we know how to do corporate investment, and we really do have a sleeping giant in Boda Kaiser. I look forward to continuing to deliver that for people because the leverage that comes from having very little of that reflected in our share price today to being able to unlock a multi-billion dollar NPV project is something I think that would be pretty good. Above all, we make cash. We don't need to raise money. We haven't raised money in donkey's years, and we're paying a dividend. Yeah.

Look forward to the next 45 years, and then I can say I've got 75+ years mining experience. That'll be great.