I would like to hand over to Mr. Bryan Quinn, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Ashley. Good morning, and thanks to everyone for joining us. Aurelia Metals March quarterly report. With me today, part of our leadership team, including Martin Cummings, the CFO, Andrew Graham, our Chief Technical and Development Officer, and Angus Wyllie, our General Manager for the Cobar Region. We'll be working our way through the slides that were released today. At the back of the end of that presentation, we'll obviously move to the people online. Look, today's release is testament to Aurelia going very strong on performance and a disciplined delivery outcomes that we've actually been able to achieve. We're really continuing to set the business up for success and each quarter delivering what we say we'll do and ultimately providing good cash flow and profits for our shareholders in FY 2026 and beyond.
From today's pre-presentation release, I hope investors can appreciate our results are very good, and we actually have a lot more to come. I'll move on to slide two, the forward-looking statement. Please, take the time to read this at your own, in your own time. On slide three, it's with great pleasure that I can present the highlights of this quarter to the market today, with some really clear sets of messages. Firstly, such a strong gold market when right now. We've been able to pivot and really deliver strong gold production, for the quarter and obviously set up an improvement to our guidance numbers as well for resetting that for the remainder of the year with a 40, obviously with the increase in ounces.
This is supported by also having ROM stocks building on our stockpiles, up to 61,000 tons. We're really setting up to de-risk the business for quarter four and beyond. Our cash flows are also moving in the right direction, moving, you know, delivering free cash flow this quarter. This is also showing some great results from our business and reinforcing our message to our shareholders that the business is heading the right direction with the production and costs and the investments we're making. Our team have been actively engaged in safety this last quarter, really putting some step changes in place around behavioral-based safety programs, implementing our revised fatal risk programs to keep people safe and really improve our close-out actions and field leadership time also.
In previous quarters, we've had numerous injuries around contracted partners, and we've been able to really focus heavily on field leadership to improve that over this last quarter. There's still a lot to do. We want everyone to return home the same way they come to work safely. That's obviously something we're very proud that we're working on these programs to improve that for people working at Aurelia. Obviously, our balance sheet has continued to remain strong and obviously Martin will talk more about that later in terms of what's happening in the balance sheet and what's gonna be happening in into the next quarter as well. Fourthly, the results from our teams at Federation have continued to demonstrate strong and disciplined delivery. Federation Mine has increased tonnages and also gold grades and adding significant value to our business.
These results are actually, you know, improving our throughput on our Peak mill as well, and that's allowed us to support the Peak throughput at record rates, which continue to ramp up as we get ready for expansion. The quality and blend of the Federation ore is really helping us be able to ramp up our Peak plant and get ready for the expansion and also build our stocks ready for these expansions. Lastly, our projects team are delivering the expansion and growth projects in the business in a very consistent way. We've actually obviously kicked off at Great Cobar. It's on track. The Thickener project and the Tertiary Mill expansion is also on track as per what we've committed in the past.
Overall, a very pleasing result for the highlights to talk to today and the message about how our business is delivering what we're committing to deliver and in some cases, exceeding expectations for the market as well. I'll just get you to turn to slide four, which is our costs and production slide. Look, key message for this slide is we're very focused on delivering value and cash, as I just spoke about. You can sort of see from the slide the increase in our guidance for gold. And also, I'll just talk a bit about that increase. Our focus for gold has been to bring in some additional stopes that we've identified from infill drilling. We're not actually taking stopes out of sequence.
These gold stopes basically weren't in sequence. We're bringing them into the plan and taking advantage of those smaller high-grade gold stopes. We're also taking advantage of taking some of the copper ore that we feed into our mill and bringing it through our lead-zinc circuit to maximize gold recovery out of that ore as well. In total, the benefit is we get more gold recovered and obviously more value for our shareholders. Obviously, we're also reporting a slight reduction in our guidance for copper, but that's also in line with the focus of pushing for more gold.
On a total value point of view, we're better off with a higher gold with the current gold prices, and that's gonna benefit our business and obviously benefit our cost structure as well. This higher gold production will deliver good operating cash and feed us more good cash flows into quarter four for this financial year and also set us up strongly for FY 2027. I'll just also highlight the operating costs. They're also very much within guidance, and we don't see any higher costs coming in from the Middle East crisis at the moment that's gonna impact these ranges. Martin will talk to more of that information in his section.
Overall, when I look at the set of guidance numbers we presented, you know, with the exceptional results in gold, with a very much good focus on delivering our projects in line with our plans, things are looking very good for the company. You'll also notice we've actually reduced our guidance for growth capital. That's all to do with our timing of our projects. The projects are on schedule. It's more around the timing of the spend of those projects, which Martin will also talk to.
I'll move on to slide six, which is the Peak performance. With slide six, Peak has continued to push development to have plenty of working areas available for production. This quarter, Cobar, Great Cobar, was slightly down on meters, due to some ventilation establishments works we had to do in that area. That works are now being set up to allow us to drive the development declines all the way to the bottom of the fresh air raise that we'll be sinking or raise boring in the second quarter of FY 2027. Pretty much that work is now set up for success for the continuation of the decline now as we move down towards Great Cobar.
With the buildup of the stocks from both Federation and Peak, we've, as I said earlier, accumulated 61,000 tons of ROM available for mill. Effectively, this has enabled our mill to keep punching out really strong throughputs through the mill and allow us to deliver some record throughputs this quarter, which is impressive. Really wanna take my hats off to the teams who are basically running the mill. We're getting not just good throughputs, but also higher recoveries. As in the presentation, you see some of the gold recoveries continue to improve, which is great for our profitability of the business also.
Key message here is the plan's ramping up well in FY 2026 and setting up for FY 2027 once these expansions come online that I'll talk to very soon. The stock buildup is by design and really focused on us de-risking the FY 2027. Overall, pretty happy how we're progressing and really happy how the team can continue to add value to the bottom line.
I'll move on to the Federation slide. Further great news from the Federation performance. Mining tonnes ahead of target. We're currently 42% higher than the previous quarter. Gold is up by 11% on grade, and both of these sort of key physicals are supporting our improved recoveries in the plant as well. Overall, Federation Mine continues to be a success story with additional information that Andrew will provide around the exploration as well. We do see the Federation being a really good story for our investors going forward.
Just on, Federation's cost, the cost per tonne is also moving in the right direction as we committed to as well. As we ramp up our tonnes, we are seeing a reduction in our cost per tonne, which is great. Really proud to sort of present these results to the shareholders, in terms of where Federation is. These are the sort of increase in volumes we committed to, the reduction in cost we committed to, and the sort of improvement in our performance is shining through, hopefully, for shareholders. I'll just move on to the growth projects and exploration slide. I'll talk about the growth projects and hand it over to Andrew to talk to us through the exploration update for the quarter.
Firstly, Great Cobar on slide nine. You can sort of see from the timeline, the project's progressing well in line with our commitments. As I said earlier, the focus is getting development down to the bottom of where the fresh air raise will be in place. We'll have development punching down underneath those areas, and then we can start the raise bore work in quarter two, FY 2027. The raise bore is a key milestone for us, for the project. Obviously, we're working through finalizing the contractors for that work now, and we'll be putting a lot of discipline and focus around making sure that deep shaft raise bore is done to the best level. Taking learnings from the shafts we've done at Federation and industry as well to make sure we do that well.
The other major change we made in quarter three was the sequencing of the development declines beyond the actual raise bore shaft. We're going to be putting our development to sequence to get down to the drilling platforms sooner, so we can set up a drilling platform for infill drilling and also exploration drilling and really unlock the potential of this resource base reserves that Great Cobar has for this company. We all believe it's gonna be a game changer, but obviously, we've got to get down there and put those additional holes in to hopefully give the shareholders confidence in where it's going. I'll just talk to slide 10 now, which is the expansion projects. There's two parts to the project which are progressing very well.
Firstly, the tailings and process water management, aka the thickener project. That project is going very, very well. In fact, right now we're dry commissioning that particular thickener, and we'll be basically moving into wet commissioning in middle of May as part of a cut over into the plant when we do the shutdown. At this point in time, nothing's stopping us from really delivering what we said we're gonna deliver there in terms of the schedule. That's gonna bode very, very well for us as well because effectively, we'll be pushing higher copper ore through in quarter four of FY 2026. That copper ore obviously will get the benefit of better recoveries and better throughput from the thickener once it's in place as well. That'll actually work out timing-wise perfect for our sequencing.
The second project is the tertiary ball mill. All the major items are on site. All the excavation work has been done. We're now in the process of starting to build the Tertiary ball mill and all the electrical works. It's on schedule for quarter one FY 2027 also. Going very, very well and we're looking forward to seeing that. I'll just reinforce the fact that we've been able to build up stocks ready for the expansion is a great result for the team. The fact that we're getting the recoveries through the mill as it stands now and setting up for the expansion is a great result. The fact that our grades are sort of moving through the plant in a nice way, delivering significant value for us is also in line with our plan.
As I said earlier, these are all the right steps in the right direction for us as a company at this point in time, and really happy how the project's been delivered safely. I'm just gonna hand over to Andrew to talk through the exploration slides.
Thanks, Bryan. On slide 11 now for those following along through the pack. Last week we were very excited to be able to release a Nymagee District exploration update. If you haven't had a look at that release, I'd encourage you to jump on our website or the ASX website and have a look. Obviously we've been doing very extensive underground infill drilling at Federation. But this reporting is of our first exploration-focused drilling from underground. We had to get the declines down, get the platforms in place to then be able to do exploration to add value. It's great that this first program was immediately successful.
The three key items at Federation that we released. Firstly, we drilled out Federation West further down dip, and we got an extremely good hit about 70 meters further down dip. That's extended that Federation West ore body. You know, when I say very high grade, you know, we were 43% lead plus zinc with 1.2% copper with 0.9 grams gold. You know, a fantastic intercept over 9 meters. That image that's on the slide, it's in the center there on hole 354. Extremely exciting. We do need to do more work to see if that continues to extend. We are doing some very early work thinking about whether we push an exploration drive in that direction to allow us to explore there, but also to explore the central part of the Federation ore body at depth.
The other interesting piece in that slide, which you can see on the left-hand side, is we discovered a new lens further west, and we've called this the Harley Lens. It was intercepted from surface as well as from underground. Grade's good. Still an enormous amount of work to be done on that. The pleasing piece for investors to think about is that we found that offset on Fed West, and now we're seeing additional mineralization further west, which bodes very well for us continuing to find more at Federation.
The other fringe benefit we had from exploring from underground is we actually hit some very good mineralization in the early part of the exploration hole. They're adjacent to the underground workings. This material's been handed straight over to the mine to infill, and they bring into the mine plan. When I say very, very high grade, we got 43 grams gold over 3.9 meters. We got 48% lead plus zinc over 5.5 meters. You know, these grades are just exceptional, and that'll feed straight into the mine plan as additional material for us to mine.
The other bit in our release, we covered some regional work, Lyell and Lancelot particularly in that release. It is important to recognize that we're doing quite extensive regional early stage works, both at the Nymagee District but also in the Peak District or the Cobar District around Peak, and that's explained in our quarterly report. We're on the hunt for the next Federation, and it's really exciting to be able to step beyond the mine areas and start looking for these future deposits for the company. Pass over now to Martin on the balance sheet.
Thanks, Andrew. I'm turning to slide 13, which has our cash waterfall for the quarter. As Bryan mentioned, this has been an extremely good quarter for us, which has culminated in an increase in cash to AUD 94.7 million, and that excludes any restricted cash. Our Cobar Region cash flow from ops was AUD 36.2 million, driven by strong gold production and sales and also continued strength in metal prices. As you can see on the right side of this slide, precious metals remains our dominant revenue source at the moment, and our production outperformance to date this year has enabled us to take advantage of these higher prices. Our hedge book only has 6,000 ounces left over the next three months, so our realized prices will benefit from full exposure to spot from July this year.
Our operating costs were higher this quarter in line with our plan as mining rates ramp up at Federation. Federation mining costs include a slightly higher proportion of operating development that is supporting the above plan production from the mine. For Peak, our mining costs in total were lower, which along with higher mine tonnes, reduced our unit cost to AUD 142 a tonne. This does remain above our target with initiatives underway through our mining productivity improvement project to either lower spend or increase tonnes mined. Our processing costs were slightly higher this quarter, driven by planned maintenance.
I'll just cover off diesel as part of our cost base. We have a long-term supply contract for diesel, and our deliveries have remained as planned with no interruptions. We continue to have regular engagement with our supplier, and we're comfortable from a supply perspective that these deliveries will continue uninterrupted. As we set guidance around diesel represented around 3% of our total costs. With the recent increase in oil prices, that's more like 6% today.
As we noted in the report, there are also some rises and fall clauses within our contracts, mainly for logistics-related activities. We're monitoring all our contracts very closely, and again, we will expect to see some cost increases come through from that. Overall, we're comfortable that these costs will be managed within our cost guidance, therefore, we haven't altered our cost guidance today. Lastly, on the Cobar cash flow with our sustaining capital, which is reported as part of that AUD 36.2 million. Sustaining capital was lower. For those who've been following that over the year, our spend profile was biased to the first half, with some equipment replacement and some machine overhauls. The majority of our spend now for the rest of FY 2026 is on sustaining mine development, and we expect to therefore come in within our guidance range of AUD 50 million-AUD 60 million for the year.
For growth capital, as Bryan mentioned, we did lower our guidance with three main drivers. Firstly, on the plant projects, when we set our guidance, we did include all of the capital for these projects in FY 2026. There's around AUD 3 million of spend for the ball mill that will now be incurred early in FY 2027 as we commission the ball mill. The crushing and materials handling project of around AUD 8 million has been deferred.
For Federation this year, we have balanced our mining activity between operating and capital development activities. Whereas the guidance did have a higher bias towards pushing the decline down in capital. This change to balance between operating and capital has meant less capital spend at Federation and about AUD 5 million, which we'll push into FY 2027 for the decline. Lastly, around our financing cash flows, we did add another AUD 10 million to restricted cash for rehab bonds, taking the total to just under AUD 38 million. It was a particularly pleasing result that even with that extra AUD 10 million in restricted cash and the payment of some taxes, we still grew our cash balance over the quarter.
Just turning to slide 14, it was a very busy quarter for us on the refinance process, which culminated in the execution of a commitment letter and a term sheet with three tier-one global institutions for a senior secured AUD 150 million facility. I'm absolutely thrilled with what we were able to achieve with this strengthening our balance sheet even further. Of key significance was the performance bond facility, which we've managed to upsize by AUD 45 million- AUD 110 million. That 110 million is split into an AUD 80 million five-year tranche and a AUD 30 million three-year tranche and provides enough capacity and headroom to cater for rehab bond requirements for the foreseeable future.
Crucially, in this facility, there are no requirements to cash back like we have been, any bonds for the term of the facilities, which is a key differentiator. For our revolving credit facility, again, it's slightly larger than what we put in place with Trafigura and has no amortization profile built in, meaning we are able to access that facility limit for the term of the facility being three years. Finally, as we've noted, the pricing is very competitive relative to the market and also considerably lower than our current facilities. Just to close off comments on the refi, I'd just like to thank our Aurelia team and our advisors for the effort to secure this amazing commitment. My thanks also to Citi, Crédit Agricole, and HSBC for your demonstrated support of our business going forward.
I'd also just like to shout out to some of the other institutions that were involved in this process. As we included in the announcement, this was an oversubscribed process, and we weren't able to accommodate all of the credit-approved offers that we received. I do thank you for your efforts in participating with us. In summary, it's been a fantastic quarter for us with strong production, generating free cash, and our future financing facilities in place, with financial close targeted for May. Thank you, and I'll hand it back to you, Bryan.
Yeah. Thanks, Martin. Thanks, Andrew. Just to, you know, wrap up in terms of the key focus areas for the organization, you know, to leverage the results for this quarter and the previous quarters that we've been able to achieve to the market. Yeah, we're really safely prioritizing strong gold production and delivering a robust cash flow outlook, building on what we've already put in place and building on the balance sheet that Martin just talked about, and obviously building on the refi we're doing as well. The company's in really good shape and much more to come.
Our focus areas are really about maximizing cash flow generation and value through, you know, using our portfolio of both the operations to maximize that and as we said before, to continue to maximize the plant throughput, and work towards our objective of 40,000 copper equivalent tons in FY 2028. At this point in time, all the projects, all the work is well underway and on track and delivering as we've committed. We are gonna continue to outperform plan at Federation. It is going very well, as I mentioned, and hopefully the investors can sort of see that Federation is delivering now and with the information Andrew shared, it's got a lot more potential that will be unpacked in the near future.
We're gonna continue to execute our plan at Peak as well. We've put a productivity project in at Peak and really looking at how we can extract more value from the Peak operations while Great Cobar is being set up. It's gonna be a key ongoing focus to execute that productivity improvement plan. In terms of Great Cobar, it's about us really focusing on the key milestones that need to be achieved and make sure that we de-risk any of the project sort of deliverables and make sure they deliver on time and on cost going forward to set up the business properly going forward as well, like we have for the other projects.
Importantly, we need to continue to attract and retain the right people in the organization to enable us to do this. You know, Aurelia has really good infrastructure and improving that infrastructure through the expansions. It has a high prospective geology, as we've always spoken about. You can sort of see from the grades and the recoveries we're getting now, both the geology and infrastructure support. In fact, this business can deliver lots of value for our shareholders. With the right people, you know, this business can really thrive going forward beyond what it's doing now.
Really want to wrap up by saying thank you to our teams for their support in getting these results. Like I said, there's a lot more to come, and the organization's in a really good position right now to leverage what we've built over the past. Ashley, I'll hand it back over to you, so we can go through any questions we may have, and then I'll provide a wrap up after that.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question today comes from Paul Kaner with Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks, Bryan, Martin, and Andrew. Just a couple of questions from myself. Firstly, just on guidance at Peak, you're obviously prioritizing gold now by focusing on some of those smaller, more complex stopes. Sort of noting that these were outside of the mine plan, I just wanna confirm that there's sort of no implications for 2027 guidance and that sort of stope sequencing in FY 2027.
Yeah, thanks, Paul. I'll answer that briefly and hand it over to Angus if he wants to add anything to it. Basically, these stopes were identified during infill drilling from the various underground workings. The opportunity was while we're there, we could you know set them up for success and take the gold ore now. We're not sort of robbing you know or bringing things forward to take them now and then shortfall FY 2027. That's exactly what we're not doing. Angus, any other comments on that at all?
Yes. As Bryan said, no, we're not robbing from 2027. The tech services team have done a great job identifying different additional resource areas and able to bring that into the plan this year.
Okay, great.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah, that answers it. I guess, is there any additional material that you've identified from infill that can maybe come into the mine plan now for FY 2027?
Um-
I'm sorry. Angus, go ahead.
There's ongoing infill work at both Chesney and Kairos at the moment and Peak North. Yeah, we'll continue to bring material in as it presents itself. Certainly, yeah, we continue to see good results from our infill, and the team are working hard on bringing that material forward.
I guess the key point, Paul, is that, you know, obviously we aren't stealing from the future to pay for now. This is opportunistic ore that we can bring in while we're in those locations using the infill information we have now. It's a great result for our regional tech services team to identify these things and with the current prices, be dynamic about these things as well, without destroying, you know, sort of medium, long-term shareholder value. We're very excited by this opportunity we've been able to find based on the current price environment as well.
Yeah. No, that's clear, Bryan. I guess, given there's no change to group operating cost guidance, there's no material additional costs by bringing this stuff in?
Look, in terms of the you know, these smaller stopes obviously require the same amount of setup as a larger stope. When you're seeing you know, multiple smaller stopes, it's the same for the total volume of large stope, you do have to put some additional costs into it. As we sort of reported, the cost per ton at Peak is obviously down from last quarter, not down to where we'd like it to be in terms of where we're sort of focused on as a business through our productivity improvement projects. Those costs are sort of still in line with our guidance. It's not changing those numbers. That's correct, Paul.
Yeah. Great. Just last one from me, just on that capital growth capital deferral there at Federation. You're prioritizing operating development. I guess similarly, what sort of implications does this have for 2027 and 2028 developments, specifically the decline development there in 2027?
Yeah. We're pushing the decline development down to set up for infill drilling and exploration drilling. In terms of the overall production profile, it doesn't impact the overall production profile. In fact, if you look at our development meters at Federation, we're actually going very, very well with development meters. I have to say on balance, when we talk to the GOs about what's required versus our production profile, we can deliver both with the current scheduling and current profile we're delivering. There's no impact on FY 2027. In fact, FY 2027, we're quite hopeful that we can present some really good numbers on what that looks like also, on the basis of FY 2026 numbers in production.
Okay, great. No, that's it from me. I'll pass it on. Cheers.
Thanks, Paul.
Your next question comes from Paul Hissey with Moelis Australia. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Look, apologies, I did try to cancel my questions. Seeing as I'm here, just to follow up, but I mean, from the outside looking in. Sorry, let me go back a step. You provided a great breakdown with Paul there earlier. Just from the outside looking in, it does look like you're trying to prep the business to be a little bit more defensive from a cash flow perspective with the deferral of some of the CapEx and the prioritization of some potentially higher margin gold material.
Look, I think you probably answered the question around what's driving that. Maybe just a little bit more on the timing of the CapEx and some of these projects that look like the spend is going to now move out into next year, if you can, Bryan, please.
Yeah, sure. Look, on the CapEx for the expansion for the tertiary mill, that's just a timing thing in terms of when the work's getting done and obviously when the money will come through. It doesn't change the schedule. We always said quarter one FY 2027 would be sort of target time for ramping up. You know, we're still with that quarter. It's just a timing thing, Paul, in that case. In terms of the other capital that Martin spoke about, basically when we set that target in FY 2026, it was based on sequencing of the mines when we're gonna be obviously taking more ore out of the north mine versus south mine.
With the current gold prices and current commodity prices in general, yeah, we are. Definitely the plan looks in favor of more mining out of the south mine. We have a crusher in place underground for the south mine in situ. When it looks at timing of when we need to put the mobile crusher or crusher and materials handling in, we're still working through that as management. When that's likely to be in place, we'll then sort of talk about when that capital is required.
Right now, it's not urgent to put it in, but it will be at some point in time. We're just working through timing. It's nothing to do with you know, trying to defer capital for cash or anything else. It's just literally a timing of when it makes sense based on when the mine plan dictates when it should actually happen. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Just in terms of the other part of the question on in terms of you know taking higher grade now, it literally is because we are in working areas where we've done infill drilling. We thought we'd be closing out areas, and we aren't closing them out. We're finding more. Rather than come back later, you're best to take it now and the price environment supports that. It makes complete sense. It's not high grading. It's literally taking the high grade that we're finding in those areas while we're working there, while we're looking at you know closing those areas out. We're not closing them out. In fact, we're opening them up. It's fantastic news, the tech service guys have been able to work on that for us.
Yeah. Okay. Understood. Thanks, Bryan.
Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. We'll now pause a short moment for any final questions to register. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Quinn for closing remarks.
Yeah. Thanks, Ashley. Thanks, everyone for dialing in today to hear the Q3 March quarter results. Like I said, we are very happy how we're traveling as a company. I'd like to thank obviously the teams on the ground. Everyone's contributing to these results across the board, both our employees and contracting partners. Special thanks to obviously the executive leadership team. They're working very hard to set the company up for the future, and making sure that we've got the right sort of thinking in place to continue to deliver value, both at the cash flow level and value for our shareholders as well, and the board for being supportive of the plan we've put in place and the strategies we're delivering against right now.
Once again, thanks to shareholders for supporting us and believing the story and tracking us as we continue to improve. We believe we have a good outlook, and we believe there's much more to deliver in the future quarters. I hope you can continue to support us, and we'll keep delivering. Thanks very much for joining the call. We appreciate it.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.