Black Cat Syndicate Limited (ASX:BC8)
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Apr 28, 2026, 3:59 PM AEST
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2025 Precious Metals Summit - Beaver Creek

Sep 10, 2025

Gareth Solly
Managing Director, Black Cat Syndicate Ltd

Okay. Come on in, guys. Thank you for the introduction and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be here at Beaver Creek providing an update, or you know, the first time for Black Cat to be here and providing hopefully some insight into what WA gold producers can do from a standing start at the beginning of this year. We weren't a producer last year, really, so we are now. We started producing from not one, but two operations, which we're ramping up at the moment. More gold sooner, that's our motto. As I say, we were producing no gold at the beginning of this year, and we're rapidly ramping up two operations. In the March quarter, we're effectively running at about a 40,000 oz per annum run rate. By the middle of this year, 60,000 oz per annum. Right now, this quarter, we're planning to do about 80,000 oz per annum. End of the year, 100,000 oz. That's the speed that we're going to be ramping up these two operations. Starting new mines right now that we're feeding into our mills as we grow our production profile. We've got 2.5 million oz of gold across our three projects, all within Western Australia. We've also got some antimony, and Mike talked about projects in the area that we're currently operating and drilling at the moment. We've got cash bullion at the end of June of about AUD 54 million, and we've got no debt, no hedging, and we're generating cash right now from our operations. It's been a fantastic year for us. We started mining about 12 months ago, but we really only started processing our own ore sort of nine months ago, beginning of this year. It's been a big growth year for us. You can see that we've had great appreciation in the share price. Part of that's definitely attributable to the gold price, but the rest of it's because we're very active. We do a lot. We're starting operations, and we've effectively started three mines and started pouring first gold on three occasions during that last 12-month period. We've got a current market cap over AUD 700 million, so we've had good appreciation in the share price. We've got good liquidity in the stock. We've got, as I said, at the end of June, AUD 54 million in cash and bullion, and that's been increasing every month. We've got investments in some fellow explorers up in the Pilbara and Gascoyne area, AUD 4.6 million in value there. Top 20 shareholders have about 54% of the stock. The board has about 3.2%. That board includes myself, Paul Chapman, and Les Davis, all Founding Directors of Black Cat. Paul and Les were Founding Directors of Silver Lake Resources, which is now Vault Minerals. More recently, David Bosio and Richard Laufman joined the team late last year. David's here at the conference as well. More recently, Amber Rivamonte has just joined us. Also here at the conference, we've got Nick Dwyer, our Chief Financial Officer, and rounding out the executive team, we've got Tim Mason, our Chief Operations Officer. More gold sooner, that's our motto. At this point, we don't need to convert everything we are mining into cash. We don't need all the cash at the moment. We set ourselves a target of holding a bit of bullion. That's been paying off, obviously, because when we set this, the price was around AUD 5,000, probably just under AUD 5,000, and now it's in Aussie dollar terms, five and a half. Good appreciation there. Gold's really liquid when you can sell it with a phone call. For us, this is a no risk. Obviously, we're believers in the gold price, which I think most investors probably are if you're buying gold stocks. Two producing assets, Poulson’s up in the Pilbara, up where a lot of Mike was just talking about his projects, and then Kal East, obviously just east of Kalgoorlie. These two operations are going to be the focus for us. We're ramping them up. We'll get to 100,000 oz. We'll take it further from there and get north of 100,000 oz with those two operations. Coyote is up in the Tanami. That's a third gold project at the moment. That's in an exploration phase slash development phase. The 650,000 oz of high-grade gold up there. Then we've got our Mount Clement antimony project. That's a large undeveloped antimony resource. We'll be drilling there within the week and growing that in what is a great antimony price environment as well as gold price. Talking to the operations now, firstly, Kal East, this is a bigger project. We've got 1.3 million oz here. The big news for this project is the fact that we acquired the Lakewood processing facility earlier this year. The transaction ended up occurring at the end of March, and on the 1st of April, we were producing gold from our own stockpiles. That facility is 50% larger than what we originally intended to build when we did our studies here at Kal East. It's been a fantastic upgrade. At this point, we need to find more ore to fill that mill in the short term as we ramp up our new mines that are beginning in this current month. It has also sped up what we're doing. We don't have to wait 18 months to go and build a mill. This one is bigger, probably cheaper, and readily available straight away. It's fantastic. The metrics in the table down below are all based on the study. They're out of date because gold price is higher, the mill is larger, and obviously we're going to be doing a lot more activity. The Lakewood processing facility itself, brilliant. It's right on the doorstep of Kalgoorlie, a large center and definitely the gold mining capital of Western Australia and Australia. Local workforce, grid power, new upgrades. It's running at 1.2 million tons per annum right now. It can be upgraded to 1.5 million, and that's something we'll do once we're building stockpiles ourselves, which will be later in 2026. Right now, we've got plenty of third parties that are lined up at the door who want to toll treat through this mill. It's going to be full until we can feed it ourselves. I'll talk to the two new mines that will be coming into this, being Majestic and Fingals. We're currently producing from Myrie, and we're starting two new operations to feed into this. It's a hub-and-spoke mining approach. The mines are about 40 km from the mill. We just fired the portal here at Majestic on the 1st of September. We're just putting in the first brand new decline and vent circuit. This will be 30% of the mill feed for the Lakewood mill over the next four or five years. The other 70% over the next four or five years will come from this open pit at Fingals Fortune. Nice high grade for an open pit. It's going to be larger than the metrics you can see here. There's an underground that'll come to fruition after we finish the open pit. Poulson’s itself has been ramping up since the start of the year. We're seeing good improvements. We did 4,600 oz in the June quarter. We're planning to do about 7,000 oz, 7,500 oz this quarter. That'll keep growing as we go forward. This was an easy facility for us to refurbish and get going as a junior. Nice and simple, small mine, one mine feeding into one mill. Here, we've been drilling again since February. It's important you do keep drilling. Obviously, these mines have short mine lives. For us, you know, we've got about a four-year mine life, and we're drilling at the moment in and around, adding in and replacing what we're mining. You can see here some of the grades we're seeing in the gabbro veins, 1.6 m at 600. We expect more of that. That's an exciting new opportunity that we'll start mining soon. In terms of the growth projects in the company, Coyote is the other gold project. Here we've got 650,000 oz, about 5.5 g/ ton. The jewel here is the underground at Coyote. It's about 14.6 g resource grade. The geology here is similar to what you see 200 km down the road at Newmont's Tanami mine. It's sedimentary geology, high-grade gold on the sedimentary bounds and the axial planar surfaces. The mill here was installed back in 2008, operated till 2013. It's a 300,000 ton per annum plant. We've got a 180-man camp, airstrip, and we've added a lot of mine life with a short amount of drilling. We've got a scoping study out here, 200,000 oz at 3.7 g going through that mill. We want to upgrade the processing plant. Economies of scale, if we can get it to 500,000 or more. What we're doing at the moment is more drilling, more engineering, and study work. The Mount Clement project, which is the antimony. When we purchased the Poulson’s asset in 2022, this project came with it. It's got about 13,000 tons- 14,000 tons of antimony metal on one vein of six veins that have been mapped here at Mount Clement. It is a large undeveloped antimony resource. We've got rigs starting to drill here this week. The potential here is the exploration target of 100,000 tons of antimony metal. Right now, obviously, the focus for us is growing the resource, doing the metallurgical studies so that we can optimize a processing solution and monetize this asset. Plenty of exploration going on for that. In that general region up in the Pilbara, up around Poulson’s, we've got multiple rigs right now, underground as well as surface. Some of those targets, obviously, there's the underground drilling where we've got really good grades coming out of the areas like the gabbro veins, which is a new area for us, but also extensions around the main zone of the original ore body. We've got targets like the Poulson’s West target, which is a potential repeat type structure. There's a parallel shear, and we're trying to target that exactly where the mine gabbro, which is the gabbro that hosts the Poulson’s mineralization, may be intersected by that parallel shear. That's interesting. We've got our first hole in. We've hit about 30 m of altered gabbro with some veining in it. We're repositioning, and we've started drilling the second hole, trying to target in and try and nail where the shear breaks that. You're looking for where the shear hits that vein, or that gabbro unit. Big Sarah, first ever drilling that's been going into that project. Historically, it was mined in the 1930s. Quite exciting. We'll have assays back soon to see whether there's any gold in the veins that we've been seeing. As I said, we've got antimony drilling happening at Mount Clement. Later in the year, we'll be back at Kal East, and we've got drilling happening up at Coyote next year. In summary, Black Cat is a producer now. We're producing from two centers, Poulson’s and Kal East. We're targeting to be 100,000 oz per annum production rate by the end of this year. We've got an aspirational target to get to 200,000 oz with the projects that are in their portfolio right now. The production is ramping up quarter -on- quarter, so steady growth in production. We're starting to see some re-rate, but certainly there's a long way to go to be re-rated like a 100,000 oz producer would be if you compare to some of the peers that we have out there. Have a look at that. We think we should be able to get ourselves up to somewhere towards a $1.5 billion market cap if we get to 100,000 oz per annum. Lots of organic news flow coming out of this company. Four rigs operating right now. There's going to be more coming. There's going to be resource upgrades. There's going to be some antimony sizzle to go with the gold. We've got no debt, cash flow coming in, and no hedging. If you want more information, come and see us somewhere around the conference. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Gareth.

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