Aurelia Metals Limited (ASX:AMI)
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May 1, 2026, 4:10 PM AEST
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Noosa Mining Investor Conference

Jul 24, 2025

Speaker 1

To start, obviously, as a business, our market capitalization continues to reflect a confrence in the market and our strategy that we're putting forward from two years ago. Our people and our business continue to grow. This afternoon what I'd like to do is talk really about our performance. Obviously, that's very important. That's generating cash. That's generating our growth potential. I'll talk about really what we're doing to grow our business to be, you know, sort of a much more valuable business to our shareholders in the near future. Obviously, I want to reinforce that, you know, we're a business that's actually got good, strong cash on hand. We have a debt facility we haven't drawn down, and we're just finishing building one mine, about to start building another mine. As a company, you know, I know we're in the gold section of this afternoon.

We still have a majority of gold in our business. Over the next couple of years, we'll be transitioning using the great gold revenues that we're generating to move to a more obviously base metals business as we develop our operations, which I'll talk about. Obviously, in the Cobar region, we've got a pretty competitive situation. I do think we're in a Tier 1 mining location, thanks to Luke's introduction to that comment again. You know, we've got two processing facilities. We have our Peak Mine, we have our new Cobar Mine, and we've just obviously been building our Federation Mine, all within the vicinity of 150 km of each other, supported by main roads, very good main roads, both council and state. We're actually in the vicinity of the Cobar Township, which is very established and has a very good history of mining.

I think our sort of work with the town, the community, and the government has given us good social capital in that region as well. We know social capital is such an important thing these days for building a business. If you haven't got that, you can have the best resource in the world and no one cares. We've got that in place. We've got our residential situation well and truly, 65% of our people living there, and we offer DIDO and FIFO. The sort of the blotched out area between the top of the picture and the bottom of the picture, where it really starts and went down the bottom, that's along the Rochelle Fold. Very prospective area. You know, the geos tell me there's over 200 shafts of old mines along there. To me, that's a sign of potential and prospectivity.

We've got a lot of work to do to continue to unlock that. One of the real big pictures for this region is we've got a really good conversion rate of drilling holes into resource. As a company building our profile, that's something we're really focused on to continue growing. I'd really want to just point out from a performance point of view, the teams have done an amazing job this year to meet all of our group production and cost targets. There's obviously a lot there. We do have multiple commodities with gold, copper, zinc, lead. Our operating costs are well and truly in tow, sustaining our growth capital and obviously exploration costs as well. We've actually stopped reporting or guiding on all-in sustaining costs now. As we transition from gold to base, obviously that measurement gets very sort of highly fluctuant.

We basically have moved to more focus on costs and then we'll move to a different metric in the coming years similar to our peers. Overall, in terms of performance, definitely, we committed to this guidance. We've achieved this guidance and we've grown our business as well in terms of building our new project, which has been under budget this year as well, the Federation Mine. To do that, the guidance numbers support our cash flow. Just to give you a bit of a position of our strength of our balance sheet, we started the year quite strong. We've spent money building our Federation Mine, but on top of that, we've generated good cash out of our existing mines. We've closed one mine, which is a Dargues mine at the first quarter of FY 2025, and we've run our Peak Mine over FY 2025.

Between, I guess, one mine running full and one mine closing, we've generated over $103 million cash. In doing that, it has allowed us to really fund our growth in Federation Mine and in exploration as well. I think that's a pretty enviable position for us to be in. We finished a year at $110 million cash. We built the mine and got the cash reasonably close to what we started with. Plus, we've had to put some money forward for bonds as well. We've got a loan that we haven't drawn as well as a backup plan, obviously, that we haven't even needed to even think about. Total liquidity is $146 million for a business that's on its way growing to 40,000 copper equivalent tons that I'll talk about. Our business has got a clear roadmap.

We believe obviously that with the Peak Mine producing, we've also got the Federation Mine ramping up I'll talk about very soon. We've also got a Great Cobar Project just about to kick off, which is a new mine, a copper gold mine. We are on our way to a roadmap to really produce approximately 40,000 copper equivalent tons. For those who follow the region in copper, we have some peer companies around the area, which are a little bit larger than this, which have significantly higher valuations than we do. It's obviously interesting to see that as we progress and build our business, our value will only go up. Effectively, our base metal will be base metals dominant going forward in the future in three years' time as we sort of use the great revenues from gold right now to fund our future.

We are targeting some significant cash coming out of the business once we start ramping this business up. We're really applying a strict capital management to maintain the strong balance sheet. As I said, that's evident in the fact we just built our Federation Mine within budget, which I don't really hear very often in the mining industry at all, that sort of same conversation. How are we doing it to grow our business to the 40,000? Over the next period of time, we've got several projects which are approved that are ramping up. Obviously, the Federation project has basically moved into ramp-up phase now as we go to full production over the next couple of years. We've already had approved a water management upgrade to our Peak processing facility, which gives us much better recoveries and better costs on consumables as well.

We see our costs come down as a result of that. We have some optimization work that we're seeking approval for soon once we've finished that study work. We have the Great Cobar Project, which I'll talk about shortly, which is a new project we've just kicked off on the 1st of July, which is an exciting time for the company. If you look at this timeline, there are small pieces of projects. They're not massive projects. We've proven we can deliver projects like we have at Federation. Obviously, now we're moving into the next phase of expanding our processing facility in the water management and the Peak optimization. We're building Great Cobar, which is our copper gold business going forward. Inevitably, what will happen as a result will be a 1.1 million- 1.2 million ton throughput business just feeding Peak only and the Peak processing facility.

That'll give us 50/50 copper gold and zinc lead. That doesn't mean we've finished. We've also got the Hera processing facility that I talked about earlier, the two plants we have that we're going to continue to look at how we can use that going forward as well with the resource we have in the region. Just a quick snapshot at Federation. This is just a one-year outlook for Federation. We get a lot of questions about what does it look like at Federation for the next 12 months and where have you come from. Federation really is ramping up in FY 2026. Our focus is on pushing the decline down and generating value out of between 320,000- 340,000 tons we'll produce. It is a high-grade mine, zinc lead, copper gold. Effectively, the surface facilities are all finished. The fans are installed. Power is installed.

There's a small amount of work to be done on a couple of road intersections that we have full approval for. Really, this mine now is just ramping up and business as usual and feeding our processing facility at Peak. We transport the material now via truck from Federation to the Peak processing facility and with triples. We have full approval to move to 600,000 tons per annum through that process as well. From my point of view, when I look at the growth profile, we've delivered this project and it's well on its way now to giving our shareholders significant value. This is a ramp-up profile for Federation. We've been very focused on developing, as I said, the mine. We've prioritized developing a decline and understanding the ore body really well.

Obviously, the more we can understand the ore body, the more reliable we can be on setting guidance, setting targets, and delivering in line with our commitments. We're not guessing, we're actually going to make sure we have the information to do that properly and therefore give confidence to our shareholders. That's the commitment we make to this sort of process. The ramp-up profile to the right is obviously where we're going. Some of these things, FY 2026, FY 2027, and FY 2028, they're all sort of broad numbers, but we can tweak those and bring more if we want to. Obviously, it just means we change the priorities of our development versus our production targets. The key message is we're on track. We've built the business and it's going to deliver lots of value for our shareholders. We've also been putting out to the market some information on our Federation West extension.

It's on the right-hand side. On the right-hand side, this is actually the Federation Mine. Over here under the car park is Federation West, about 600 m down. Some substantial results, 33% zinc, 20% lead. There are some massive numbers coming out of those extensions. This area is really rich. There are basically areas of high-grade resource. Like I said, it's just a matter of us drilling it and then basically converting it into something over the coming period that will allow us to actually understand the full potential of this region. As we said right now, our focus is on mining the Federation, ramping it up, while our exploration teams really focus on what else is in this area here around the Federation extension area as we move. That's about 140 m, by the way, from the mine. It's not too far away, accessible from underground as well.

Very exciting for us in the region to see these extra resources coming online in the near future. The really exciting thing for us, I mean, obviously finishing, completing Federation, getting ramping up is exciting, but nothing's more exciting than starting a new mine. It's a brownfield mine. It's the Great Cobar Project. It's been talked about for a long time, especially if you live in Cobar. It's been around. It's actually mining under the old Great Cobar mine. Effectively, this is a community opening. We had to celebrate the opening and obviously three of our workforce on the job ready to start mining. We basically have gone owner-operator for Great Cobar. It's actually connected to the brownfield of our New Cobar mine.

We access via New Cobar open pit, down some declines and turn right, and we move basically into the Great Cobar declines, which we've started developing from the first week of July. We've got our own equipment and our own people, and we're going forward on that basis that we believe we can mine it as good as anyone else can with the right people and the right equipment, the right sort of strategies. Very exciting for us as a company and putting our money into action in the ground at the jumbo tip effectively. This is the economics that we published a while ago. Really, as you sort of see, a spot $164 million NPV, 33% IRR at spot prices. The capital spread over three years, mainly driven by development costs and a sinking shaft in FY 2027. Realistically, it's a great project.

Very good copper, very good gold opportunity for us as well over the period of the mine as we're building it. As an animation, this is what we're doing. This is the decline work has started. It'll move down about 2 Ks down to the top of the actual ore deposit, and then basically we'll start on the decline. It's important, when I show you the next slide, we'll be drilling from a couple of the cutouts platforms at the top of the decline where we'll actually start drilling underneath the ore deposit to understand the potential of what's underneath the Great Cobar, which we think is very, very prospective for us. As you can sort of see at the top of the picture, this is the old workings of the old mine.

We've got lots of area between us, and this is basically about comes into about 600 m, and this goes under 200 m and goes up 200 m. We're going to come in right in the middle of the deposit. As I said, we know there's more potential here, and we know there's more potential there, and I'll show you a picture very soon of that. This opportunity around a copper gold growth is real for us, and we're on our way using our self-funded capital to do it. Here's the actual deposit I was talking about. This is actually what was in our feasibility studies basically here. As you can sort of see, we've got 4.3 m in this area here of 3.3% copper. You've got some extra numbers here, 3.5 m of 2.8% copper. You've got some really good numbers here. This is in our current models.

We want to get to this area here where we sort of come in the middle deposit, start drilling down and really unpack what the potential of this region is. Look, we're very, very excited by what it could be because it's unknown. Also, we can see what it is from our original holes, but it's unlimited in our view as well as a potential. Where are we going as a company, which is obviously very much focused on delivering with discipline our current guidance and our numbers so we can generate the cash, can actually grow our business in the right direction. It's really about being really focused on capital allocation, making sure that we have the strong cash quarter on quarter and deliver that to the market.

We want to make sure that we continue safely delivering improved production through our existing operations at Peak, and that will obviously then maximize cash like we have in the last 12 months to be able to satisfy ourselves that we have cash going forward where many of our other peers do not. We want to safely ramp up Federation production to full capacity. We want to make sure we deliver the Great Cobar on the milestones we've committed to, and we want to make sure that we continue looking at the growth options around us from an organic point of view using our exploration teams to do that, which we are increasing our exposure to that over the next 12 months. Of course, attract and retain the right people is going to be paramount for us as an organization. Thank you very much. Come and see us at the booth. Any questions? Thank you.

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