Climbing from over AUD 1 billion down to, in the last quarter, AUD 635 million. It means that if less money is being spent on exploration, we're getting less drilling. There's less opportunities in the marketplace for us if we're looking at drilling in as a method. We see this in the actual drilling results that we announce in ASX on section A of our report. If we look there over the recent years in red, that's the full calendar year. We see that it hit a peak in 2022 and it's been declining since. The good news is if we look at the January to June figures, which are in blue, we're seeing that we're starting to reverse that situation in 2025. That's great to hear because there are green shoots out there and great opportunities in the next six months, as reflected by those figures.
What I also like to see is we've been losing IPOs. We've hardly had an IPO for a long time, and all of a sudden, there's five new IPOs this month. Great news. Good projects, yes. They're not grassroots projects that are coming to the market, and that's great. They are good projects, and they're good companies. I think two of them are here at this conference. I know one is for sure. Check them out. Now, for the downside. That period of time after the company's been successful, it's drilled up a great resource, it's got a great project, it's ready to go, it wants to start doing all the studies that are needed to go into production, it's got to start its permitting, it's got to go from there to there. What's happening over recent time is it can take up to 10 years.
It can take longer to get through that stage. Of course, during that period of time, the market loses interest, goes on back into the drilling stage. This is a time-consuming period. There are a couple of things that need fixing. One is permitting. The fact that the state and federal duplication, environmental court challenges, these are totally unnecessary to be seeing, which you'll be seeing today in the resources sector. These are time-consuming items. More within management control are the offtake and project financing. Now, offtake and project financing, the period of time that will take is a function of the metal or the commodity that's involved. If we look at the precious metals listed on the ASX, 34 or 15.6% of gold, silver explorers, or people involved in that sector are actually in production. In the LME metals, it's 12.1%.
In the energy minerals, it's higher because we have a lesser proportion of explorers, particularly since this magic, what was it, what they call it, net zero thing came in. We virtually have very little new oil and gas and coal explorers. Now, the tough one, the technology minerals. Don't call them critical minerals. There's no such thing on the periodic table. If you go out there and you see someone up with a critical mineral sign, tell them to get it down and tell you exactly what the mineral is. They might be lithium, they might be rare earths, they might be graphites. Only 3.2% of those are on the market. That's where the challenge is if we're in those sectors. The reason behind that is if we look at the blue companies, they all have a global market of more than AUD 140 billion a year.
The others on the other side are less than AUD 40 billion. There's a huge difference between the market for petroleum and coal as there is for gallium, antimony, or germanium. That is a real factor when it comes to actually getting project financing and getting an offtake. There's less people involved. In fact, a lot of those smaller minerals are totally dominated by China. The challenge is how we can get them to where the point that explorers can come up with a deposit and find somewhere that it can be processed and turned into a product and someone that will actually buy it that isn't from China. Very tough. Explorers have to have cash. That's the key. The average cash held by explorers hit a peak back in 2021 and has been declining since. The problem is with inflation, the costs are going up.
Again, that's a challenge on management to keep a good exploration project going. Have to focus their funds on exploration, on drilling, and geophysical surveys, and so forth, and less and less as much as they can on overheads. Capital raisings have also seesawed around, but overall declined since 2021 from where the smaller companies, the ASX, 5B listed companies could raise AUD 3 billion on the market, and in the last quarter, it was AUD 980 million. Why do we get those seesaw effects? It seems that every second quarter, we get a couple of massive raisings. The beauty about it is that if we look at the raisings that are greater than AUD 10 million and the raisings that are less, the level of raisings, individual raisings of less than AUD 10 million is pretty stable.
In fact, the ASX is able to provide somewhere between AUD 400 million-AUD 600 million in sub-AUD 10 million raisings every quarter. That's great to see because that will come back into the smaller companies, provided they compete to make their project the most attractive to the marketplace. Now, let's look at the opportunities. One of the ways I like to do this is to compare the share and the commodity price changes over the last 12 months. We see in pink there a group of, sort of specialist, minerals. I won't call them what I was calling them before, where we've seen selective shares have big gains. If you take away, for example, from the titanium, heavy mineral sands group, PTR, OSM, and APAU, it comes back to where the share price now has fallen 23% for the rest over against the 221% gain. They are an anomaly.
Antimony has a similar situation with TMG, manganese with ESR, oxide with CAY, and tungsten with A11. These are dominating the actual mineral. We come down to sort of gold and silver. Commodity price has gone up 41% in gold, 25% in silver. Share price has gone up 58%. It's moved. It's moved with the commodity price. Lead and zinc has gone up higher than the commodity price. Rare earths has gone up higher than the commodity price, and the commodity price we use there is the index's neodymium. Terrible pronunciation, but if we go across the other side there and have a look at copper, the commodity price has gone up 26%, but the share price, average share price for copper stocks, has gone down 3.6%.
Gas, down 16.5%, whereas the price of natural gas around the world internationally is 50%, and you ain't seen nothing less, yes, on the east coast of Australia to where it's going to go. Cobalt too has gone up 22%, commodity price, but down 31% as a share price. These offer opportunities. Lithium down there may have started to have green shoots coming forward. It's down 29%, and the share price is down 28%. It's been fairly valued by the market. We have a look at a few of the share prices, how they've moved over the last 12 months. We take all resources, all resources, it's there in blue, and it started to rise about April. If we look at the gold ones, it started to rise earlier. It was the early marker. It started to rise about January, December, and it's still rising. Still going up.
It's still robust. It's great. If we see copper and heavy minerals or rare earths, they started to move up about April. Most of the commodities are moving up. There's great times ahead in the marketplace. Let's have a look at the opportunities. One of the opportunities is the producing gold companies. We look there. It's a pretty detailed table. It looks at all the producers over the last four quarters. We see that all of them are below the gold price with their internal rate of cost, the AISC. The average is about AUD 2,300 an ounce for an Australian company at the moment. A lot of them, the bigger companies there, are cashing up. We see companies like CMM, RMS, EVN, BAU always in the lowest cost producers quartiles, and therefore create great opportunities for investment, particularly as they cash up and look to expand their operations.
The other thing on the far corner there in pink, it says 20%. That's how much the average AISC cost has risen over the last 12 months. To me, that's a measure of the rate of inflation in the resource sector. Let's have a look at what the opportunities are also in gold. Western Australia is unique. I've got 45 little resources there inside the explorers that could come to market on this idea that there is a group of companies which will do the mining on a profit basis, and there's others that will process it in their plant. That's great. They won't all get up because, in particular, the mills around Kalgoorlie are getting pretty tied up for the next few years, but there are opportunities. There's opportunities there to turn something like 50,000 oz into AUD 40 million or AUD 50 million if the explorers get it right.
Great opportunities in some of those, and ones that have done it very well is AWJ. I think they should be on there somewhere. Copper is a commodity, as we mentioned, as the commodity price has gone up, but the share price on average has gone down. If we look at the market cap per ton, some of the producers have a pretty high market cap, and you can move down towards the explorers. They have a lower cost. There's two actual columns there, so most of the explorers are on the far side, and the producers on this side. That ranks them there and gives you some idea of the type of opportunities that are available in the copper. I've got 15 seconds left, so we're only going to go quickly through the RI, REE, and the HMS companies.
What I want to point out there is when we look at their market cap per ton of mineral they have in the ground, the producers are down the bottom. What's happening is the market's got excited about explorers and forgotten the producers, and the reality is that there are minerals and minerals, different prices are in that commodity mix. You've got to take a lot of care and look very carefully at what actually is in the rare earths or the heavy mineral group. They're getting very mixed up nowadays. Where are they going to sell the product? Where are they going to go with it? That's the message I leave with you. I think it's gold and copper. I could put gas in there for the next six months. Thank you.