Good morning, everybody. On behalf of Burgundy Diamond Mines and Bell Potter Securities, welcome to Burgundy Diamond Mines' full-year results conference call. My name is Stuart Howe, Resources Analyst at Bell Potter, and I will host today's call. From Burgundy, we have Chief Financial Officer Brad Baylis and Vice President of Technical, Pooya Mohseni. The format for today's call is that management will take us through a presentation. This will be followed by a Q&A session, which I will chair. Please enter your questions on the Zoom platform. After the presentation, I will read out your name, affiliation, and question. Today's call is being recorded, and before we get started, I want to draw your attention to the important notice and disclaimer on slides two and three of today's presentation. Gentlemen, over to you.
Thanks, Stuart. Thanks all for joining. I see lots of familiar names, so great to see. Kim is away on leave right now, so Pooya Mohseni, our VP Technical, will be standing in for Kim. Hopefully we can keep it as lively as Kim usually does. Please feel free to ask any questions as we normally do. With that, we'll go on to the first slide, and I'll let Pooya kick off here.
Thanks, Brad. Good afternoon. Good morning, everyone. This is Pooya. As Brad mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Technical with Burgundy, being with the company for about five months now. I joined the company in November of last year, and I'm here to fill in for our CEO as he's away today. In terms of 2024 full results, the ore process was pretty consistent with 2023. The head grade was lower by about 8%, and the overall carat productions were about 10% lower than what we had in 2023. The ore and waste mined were consistent with the mine plan, and that's mainly a highlight of mining out the bottom of the Sable Pit and transitioning on opening the Point Lake Pit. With that, I'm going to pass it on to Brad to speak to the financial results.
Thanks, Pooya. Yeah, so for the full year 2024, overall, obviously, you've probably all heard that the diamond market was a very tough market in 2024, especially into the second half of the year. Despite the challenging conditions, we actually sold more carats in 2024 than we did in the previous year. That was largely due to some acceleration that we did within the sales pipeline. As you recall from previous calls, we've had a priority to look at ways of trying to speed up getting our carats from the ground to market as quickly as we can. We've been working on a number of initiatives there, and we are starting to see the fruits of that labor. Our revenue per carat was down about 9% year-over-year. Despite some very difficult market conditions, we think we actually fared fairly well.
We saw prices down anywhere from 15% to 25%, depending on the type of goods across the market. We feel like we punched a little bit above our weight. On the revenue side, again, revenue was only down 6% despite the very difficult market. We feel like we did fairly well considering. Obviously, the 6% decrease in revenue impacts our EBITDA. Our EBITDA took a hit as a result of that. The biggest impact to our EBITDA for the year and our earnings for the year is due to an asset impairment. That is largely due to the lower commodity prices, but then also the timing of our reserve additions.
The big challenge, and Pooya can probably get into this a little later, but the big challenge in the resource that we're dealing with in Canada is the resource is quite narrow and is vertical. It is very difficult to get enough drill holes down vertically to be able to continue to book reserves, at least reserves at depth, which is really the biggest factor for us having to take the impairment. Next slide, Pooya. Again, this is a slide you've seen before. The big change from when we presented it in Q4 is the impairment that we booked at the end of the year. We took the impairment to PP&E, and you'll see the change from 264 down to 136.
Yeah, our net cash position, obviously, not exactly where we want it to be, and really impacted by the lower revenue, especially in the second half of the year and the transition to Point Lake. Effectively, last year, we had three pits running, but only two pits operating, two pits generating revenue. It definitely was a drain on cash, especially during the fourth quarter. Next slide. Just some further breakdown of our movement from cash. At the end of December 2023, we started at CAD 94 million and ended 2024 at CAD 25 million. Like I say, the big chunk in CapEx there with just over CAD 60 million of that related to the Point Lake stripping. We will see that as we move into 2025.
Our capital program in 2025 is 25% lower and will likely even get it lower as we continue to optimize this year. We did pay down our convertible notes, so that was a one-time repayment. At the time, we felt that that was the right thing to do and strengthen our balance sheet. That is a one-time item that will not be reoccurring. Throughout the year, we did also pay out CAD 34 million between taxes and royalties, and a big chunk of that was related to corporate federal taxes.
During 2024, we did set up an environmental trust that will provide a tax shield for those tax payments going forward where we contribute our environmental payments for closure, and those allow us to use that as a tax deduction. That is really kind of the big story from a cash perspective. Next slide. I'll pass it back to Pooya, and he'll take us through some of the growth opportunities.
Thanks, Brad. For some of the shareholders that actually believe in the investment thesis of Burgundy, mainly starting with the Ekati and thinking that it's a start of a multi-decade journey to produce high-quality diamond and sell it, this is the start of sharing some great results and being able to, for the first time, publicly share what we've seen in terms of the future. What you see on the screen is our Misery Underground Mine. As you can see, we mined this deposit in open pit. For the last four years, from the top of the pipe, which is the bottom of the pit, all the way to almost the top of the 1975 level, we mined about 3 million carats per year.
Now, the technical work in the last few months has been really focused on drilling from 1975 level to about 100 m down to understand the grade and the size of the pipe. This is really the first time that we speak to these results. What you see here in these holes, these holes that actually do have color in them, they've all been drilled, they've been logged, and the micro diamond results have been received from SRC from Saskatchewan. We've got the grade back, we've got the logging, and the very interesting thing is the lithology has transitioned from RVK to a different type of CK. Very important part there, though, is the size of the pipe on the east side where we've been able to drill remains consistent with what we've got.
What that means, as you go to lower levels, the amount of tons that we would get for ore, it shows it stays consistent. At the same time, the grades that we've been seeing from the micro diamond and modeling that we've done confirms that the grade stays consistent with what we had above us. This is excellent news because every year we mine about one and three quarters of a level. This alone on this side gives us a firm indication that we minimum have about two, two and a half years of mining out of Misery. Why this is important: Misery has, if not the highest, one of the highest grades in the world in terms of carats per ton. It carries about three carats per ton and a very, very important deposit for us.
It also allows us to defer or the need to inject capital while you're producing carats. Misery kind of produces about 60% of our carats moving forward for the next two, three, four years. Now, the focus is really on—I will go to the next slide—is on the east side, and we just started drilling, is to now understand the extents of the pipe on the east side. What you see in red and green is the size of the pipe before we started the overall drilling program. What you see in pink color is actually the current status of the model. As you can see, it is larger and deeper than what we thought. Now, with the drilling that we got ahead of us for the next two months, we are going to confirm and understand the size and the extents of the ore body on the right-hand side.
There's been an extensive micro diamond sampling also being done, especially from the 1915 level. If I go back to this slide, we almost completed the 2000 level mining in Q1. 1975 is the main source of underground production. 1950 is set up, and between 1975 and 1950, they'll be producing the majority of the underground ore coming from MUG this year. Another key point here is the intent here is actually to have enough drilling ahead of us so we could plan in terms of ventilation, geotechnical assessment, water management, and having the right-sized fleet for the underground to bring the material to surface. At the same time, we're setting ourselves up with understanding how deep this ore body goes and the extents of it. I wanted to emphasize how excited I am about the results that we received.
This is really the start of rethinking Ekati and being able to put Burgundy's stamp on it moving forward. What you see on the screen is a snapshot of Point Lake Pit operation. This is from late last week. As you can see, also, Point Lake has had significant progress in terms of removing overburden and the bottom of the pit lake that we had. To the top of the screen, you can see the waste dump and the overburden dump that's been established. To the right-hand side of it, you could see we've got the truck line up and where the operation, actually, all the infrastructure for open pit operations has been set up. We've been able to get through the majority of that overburden and the difficult mining that we've had.
Q4, and even to this day, Q1 has been about really removing the overburden and being able to daylight kimberlite pipes. What you see in the bottom, actually, the darker color is the top of the pipe. This is almost getting ready going from 400 bench to 390 bench. From about 380 bench below, we expect to see a steady ore release of ore from Point Lake, which will be about 60%-70% of the ore fit for the foreseeable future. The grade that we're expecting there is somewhere between 0.7-0.9, depends on where we are in the pipe. There is a bulk sample scheduled for May of this year. At the same time, that's the time that we're actually going to expect to see the steady ore release of ore for being ready to feed the plant.
Going through the upper benches, very similar to this is the commodity number seven for me, very similar to the other open pit mine that I've started in the past. The upper benches of the pit, always the ore that you expect to see them when you're transitioning through waste and overburden, the model tends to overestimate them. This is what we call over-smoothing impact in resource modeling. We've gone through that, and we did see a lower amount of ore than we expected on the upper benches, but that was expected, and that's the risk that we were thinking through. That's one of the key reasons we wanted to get through the upper benches, do the bulk sample, and be ready to speak for the rest of the year.
All in all, I think for both open pit and underground, we are well set up for the rest of the year. Point Lake, a very strong emphasis that we put into improving performance, has actually shown great results. We've seen about 10% improvement on our payloads. We've seen about an hour gain on productivity in our shift hours. There is a series of productivity improvements that we put in place that we're expecting to see continue. It allows us to actually reduce the unit cost for the open pit. One of the key elements that we're working for Burgundy on is to have a robust operation that, despite the cycles of the diamond price, can have healthy margins that pay for the operating costs, sustain capital, and also at the end, leave some capital for the growth.
We are on the right path on that and very pleased with the point that we are in today. The progress to get to this point has been more difficult than we were expecting, dealing with the bed overburden and the bottom of the lake removals. The majority of the challenging materials are now behind us. I would say for the last three, four weeks, we actually seen the open pit operation hitting their targets, exceeding their targets on a daily basis. With that, I'm going to pass it back to Brad to speak about the overall 2024 review.
Yeah. I think some of these items we've covered already, but I'll just highlight a few. Yeah. Pooya just talked about the transition from Sable to Point Lake. We are still mining a little bit of material from Sable as we retreat out of there. That is good news, and we're happy to have the ore going through the plant, especially as we continue to get to full production in Point Lake. We did pay back our convertible notes. We've negotiated the environmental or set up an environmental bond. This is one of the key, a big key item for us, given the amount of tax that we've paid historically. This does provide us with a lot of relief on this going forward.
We're hoping we can actually use some of the trust to carry back to our 2023 tax year and potentially get some of those dollars back. Pooya talked a little bit about life of mine extension. We'll talk about it a little bit later as well. We're still doing some drilling at Misery, and we have to do the bulk sample at Point Lake. That's really what's holding us back from doing the life of mine. The release of the life of mine, we will be in position to release that by the end of Q2. That will include the Misery extension at depth and the update on Point Lake. Yeah. The other thing, we are obviously working that the diamond market is extremely challenging and looking at any ways of reigning in cost where we can.
As part of the transition from Sable to Point Lake, we will be reducing or have been reducing the workforce quite significantly. Also, a lot of the transformation work that Pooya referenced earlier is allowing us to deliver more with a smaller fleet. Those two things will help us reduce the footprint of our workforce and drive our cash cost per carat downward. Next slide. Yeah. Moving on to 2025. If you look back to 2024, global rough diamond supply dipped below 105 million carats for the first time since 1995. That has continued into 2025 with a couple of major producers, De Beers and Alrosa, both announcing, De Beers especially, significant reductions in production for 2025. I think De Beers is down 8 million-10 million carats is what they are forecasting. Alrosa, I think, is down 3 million or 4 million carats.
I think that the supply side is starting to shape up nicely. We have seen in our first, at least the last two auctions, both February and March, we have seen like-for-like price improvement anywhere from 8%-10%. It has been pretty consistent across all sizes, which is quite encouraging. Obviously, it is early days, and we want to be cautious with this. We do hope that we can continue with a trend of steady price improvement. We do not want it to yo-yo up and down like maybe it has in the past. We are hoping for kind of a steady improvement and hoping to continue with performance from the first quarter. On the financial side, significant focus around gaining financial flexibility. We did enter into an offtake agreement for our fuel in the first quarter of the year.
This has effectively allowed us to smooth out the cash for our fuel purchase as we use the fuel versus having to pre-purchase it all upfront. A significant help from a cash perspective. We will look to continue to do that type of arrangement on an annual basis versus buying fuel months before you actually need it. We are looking . also refinancing our 2L loan either with the existing lenders or externally. That work is ongoing, and we will continue to do that work throughout the year. Pooya, you want to cover off operations?
Yeah. Thanks, Brad. The key highlight for us, and that's been really my focus joining the organization both on the technical and operations side, is bringing our break-even for the organization to a point that we have a robust outlook regardless of the diamond price and the market conditions. One of the key elements is to bring that break-even down to $70-$75 per carat. That includes our sustaining capital and then also leaving enough fund for the future underground expansions. With that, we've kicked off a productivity improvement in our open pit operation. Two elements there. By nature, moving out of Sable mine to Point Lake, that alone gives us some productivity gain given that the Point Lake and MUG are within 2 km of each other and gives us some gain in terms of the operating hours.
At the same time, we've had a very meaningful focus on productivity improvement on the open pit. We've seen almost an hour gain in terms of removing the delays out of the operations. We've seen about 10% improvement in our payloads. Slowly, we've seen a direction that we can reduce our cost per ton of mining by about 30% this year. Those are the great indication. I think I would say in terms of achieving those results, we are halfway through what we set out to do for this year. On the underground side, although the tons are not as high as open pit, the majority of the carats this year, about 60% of the carats this year, do come from underground. Our focus has been really on twofold. One, extending life that we talked about.
The other one is how do we get our underground production from about, I think, on average, we did about 2,900 ton per day last year. This year, we're targeting to get to 3,150 ton. Both open pit and underground usually do have more challenging conditions in Q1 of each year. The rest of the year, I think we're anticipating to have a really good productive open pit and underground. One other thing that we're planning to do, we'll replicate the productivity improvements that we've applied to open pit operations for underground. After that, it will be applied to our long hauling and processing. We're working through one bottleneck at a time and quite pleased with the results that we've seen.
Along the same line, actually, besides putting programs in place, we actually rebuilt some of the teams and team members and hired quite competent folks from some of the major mining organizations that are really helping us with the productivity improvements. I did mention that the bulk sample for Point Lake is expected to achieve about 100,000 tons of bulk sample from Point Lake by May. That is where we actually see a steady ore release that will keep the plant full starting halfway through Q2. I provided the path to extend the mine life at Misery Underground. One of the key things that I would like to get ahead is the ore body knowledge. Right now, we are almost 100 m below where our operation is.
With extensive programs that we've got for the rest of the year, we would like to increase that to about 150 m. That always gives us two or three years of mining ahead of us. That first Burgundy mine plan, I'm planning to release it by end of Q2. We did say the last time that we released it in Q1, really the major reason for not releasing it now is actually we've received good results so far, but the drilling has been very difficult to drill through kimberlite. We've had to reposition our drills multiple times. Especially Misery Underground is very high grade, but drilling through it historically has been extremely difficult. We've changed our approach and adjusted different types of methodology to gain strength on the micro diamond samples.
At the same time, we're now focusing our drilling to better understand the boundaries of the pipe as opposed to try to drill through the pipe. You will see the result of that being released by end of Q2. After that, it's about really bringing more life to Ekati beyond Misery Underground and Point Lake. One of the immediate deposits that we are working on is Fox Underground, which does have a lower grade in terms of the head grade. You can see it's on our reserve table, but it does carry quite valuable carats. The value per carat is quite high.
One of the significant achievements that we've made progress with is significantly reducing the upfront capital to go to the next underground deposit. The blueprint of that is already in our hand. We want to apply the same methodology that we've applied to Misery to that deposit. All in all, I think we are on the right track. Yeah, I'll pass it on to Brad for the next slide, and we can go to Q&A.
Yeah. Just an update. This was a slide we showed at year-end. We've completed a few of the items that we've been working on. We've worked with the government of Northwest Territories and been able to partner with them to increase the number of royalty valuations from 10 to 20. We may not use all 20, but this does give us the opportunity to value the goods more often. In order for us to be able to export goods, they need to be valued. The more often we can value them, the shorter we can make our diamond pipeline. We are already taking advantage of that. We've seen definitely some improvements in the pipeline. Like I said, we did come to an agreement with Macquarie on a fuel offtake agreement. They essentially bought the fuel from us for CAD 39 million.
We will pay for the fuel as we consume it. This is a nice piece of work. Like I said, we'd like to continue to do this in the future. We are working on a few other opportunities. We do have some partners, customers, clients that have presented some opportunities of kind of pre-purchasing some diamonds. There are some opportunities there. We have not really pulled the trigger on that yet. We want to see where the market goes before we do anything there. Like I said, we are looking at options to refinance or replace the 2L loan. Just as a reminder, it matures next June. We started that work a number of months ago, and we will continue until we find a solution that works for us. Like I mentioned, it is cautious optimism at this point.
We've seen definitely some green shoots from a rough diamond standpoint. I think the Christmas season was pretty good in the U.S., which obviously helps. There has been some slow improvement in China, but at least there has been some improvement. That's encouraging. Historically, China was the number two market globally for diamond sales. India continues to be a big growth area for diamonds and has now taken over the number two spot. We really need all three markets kind of going in the right direction to kind of stabilize and get the market where it needs to be. I think that's the end of the presentation. I'll pass it back to Stuart.
All right. Thanks, gentlemen. Might start with some questions from the platform as it relates to unit costs. Pooya sort of mentioned a target to get, I guess, an all-in sustaining cost down to $70-$75 a carat. I was just wondering if you could speak to what the unit costs were in 2024. I guess also you had to provide guidance for 2025. Can you talk a little bit about that and what direction we should see costs going?
Yeah. Thanks, Stuart. Good question. I first want to break down the cost structure for open pit. Where we've put the majority of our focus on has been reducing our cost per ton of mining in the open pit by about 30%. In CAD 13, and we're targeting CAD 10 per ton. It's actually based on where we operate. Still, we think we have some opportunities to improve. In terms of our overall cost per carat for the year, I think we ended up the year around $92 last year. We actually do have a tangible way to get to much lower costs. We have provided the guidance on the capital. As Brad mentioned in one of the slides, it's actually 25% lower than last year.
In terms of production, I think the key driver for that is actually completing the Point Lake bulk sample and finding out where we can maximize actually production from the underground. Please stay tuned. The intent is actually to exceed and improve upon what we achieved last year. We are well on our way to do that.
Just to clarify, Pooya, that number includes capital as well, right? That is an all-encompassing number.
That's correct.
All right. Just to recap, about $92 a carat in 2024. Should see an improvement this year and a longer-term target of 70-75. Is that sort of fair enough?
That would be including CapEx. Yes, that's correct.
Including CapEx, yeah.
Yeah. Last year was a heavier year just because of the transition from Sable to Point Lake. Like I said, we had three pits operating, but only two generating revenue. Definitely a higher spend than what we would normally have going forward.
Also, just to round out, these are questions from Campbell Morgan. Do you expect to generate free cash flow in 2025?
We do. Again, market-dependent. Yeah, with some modest price growth, we do expect to generate some free cash flow. We need it, obviously, to fund our projects. We've kind of committed to the market that we're not going to come back to the shareholders and ask for money. We're going to fund it with our own money or another non-dilutive solution. Yeah. On the guidance front, sorry, Stuart, I kind of glossed over that earlier. On the guidance front, I think we'll either be in a position on our April Q1 call or just after that to provide the guidance. Like I said, like Pooya had mentioned, we still have a few moving parts with the work ongoing at Misery and Point Lake in order to finalize that guidance.
Right. Just on mine extension opportunity, some questions from James Unger. The Misery Underground, I think Pooya mentioned wanting to have a couple of years ahead of you at all times. Is that sort of the target?
That's right. You got to remember, with underground, we almost mine one and three-quarter of a level every year. Right now, we are mining at 1975 level. The drilling has actually confirmed the ore body, the size, and the grades are good for under 100 m. That gives us a minimum two to two-and-a-half-year runway with the Misery Underground. With further drilling, we plan to go and maybe increase that, staying ahead of the operation by 150 m as opposed to 100 m. That way, it gives us more runways. Based on what we know, and again, we need to confirm the drilling on the west side. The east side looks really good where we've been able to drill. On the west side, we will conclude the drilling within the next two months.
We should be able to see with high confidence how far we will push the Misery forward. The opportunities after that will be, again, going deeper with Misery Deep Underground. There is a southwest extension of that Misery that is a really nice pipe right next to it. We put that work on hold given we wanted to focus on the Misery underground. The Misery underground carries high carats. That's why it's very important for us to continue putting all of our efforts on it. We are there reminding there's no capital associated with it. The next two deposits that we'll be working on, one is the southwest extension, and the other one is Fox underground, which does have a significant amount of indicated resources and reserves in it with high-value carats. I think we're working on significantly reducing our upfront capital for it in a very meaningful way.
Perhaps a question for Brad on diamond markets. You mentioned, I guess, on the way down, you have been able to outperform. You have seen some price improvements so far in the quarter. Are those price improvements market-wide, or are they specific to some of the initiatives that you have, like the Canadam ark, I guess, marketing initiative? Can you talk a bit more about diamond prices, please?
Yeah. I think it's not just us that are seeing some price improvement. It is kind of market-wide. Like I said, there's been some improvement and some green shoots that are showing themselves that's helping give the market a bit of confidence. Obviously, us having Canadian goods also helps us probably slightly more than the market. We typically outperform the market, but all players, regardless of where they are, would be seeing some price growth. Some of the larger players have been fairly cautious from a sales perspective to start the year. For example, De Beers hasn't really been pushing, flooding the market with goods. They're kind of being tactical about it and bringing goods on the market slowly and sustainably. I think a number of factors have helped to stabilize prices a little bit.
Great. Thank you. In terms of the balance sheet, and obviously, you announced the Macquarie fuel funding initiative earlier in the year, there is a question here as to what the interest rate is implied by that facility.
Yeah. The Macquarie deal, just under 9% on the outstanding amount.
Great. Thank you.
We've also got a fixed pricing on that agreement as well so that we're not exposed to crude pricing. That has also been helpful.
Question for me. You announced the increase in the impairment. I take it that that was based on a model, and part was price-driven and part was reserve-driven. Could you perhaps talk a bit about what those two components and how those two components impacted the impairment?
Yeah. I think it's hard to say for sure because it does get complicated when you start factoring in the taxes and things like that. I'd say it's probably likely close to 50/50 between the two. We haven't really, we haven't added any reserves yet for the year. Pooya is still working on that. We've depleted our resource base. We obviously still have our cost structure that needs to, those reserves now need to, a smaller amount of reserves need to carry the cost of the operation. Obviously, that's a factor. We were fairly conservative on price growth over the five-year window. Obviously, price is also playing a big part of the impairment as well.
Sales schedules for the year ahead, auctions per quarter. I presume there was two or three in the first quarter. Is that sort of what we should expect each quarter for the remainder of 2025?
Yeah. With the additional royalty valuations, we do have some more flexibility to hold auctions more frequently if we choose to. We did have three in the first quarter. We'll likely do three in the second quarter. Six in the first half of the year. That's more than we would have done in the past. The one caution I'll say on the first quarter is with the transition from Sable to Point Lake, definitely our production will take a hit in the first quarter just as we're not fully producing out of Point Lake and Sable is not at full production.
We're still scratching away in Sable, but it's nowhere near what we would normally get. First quarter is always a challenging quarter for Misery. Just with the underground tends to freeze up in the first quarter. Those three factors will impact our first quarter. Like Pooya mentioned, after the first quarter, we expect to be back to normal production for the remainder of the year.
Great. Another one, perhaps for Pooya, you mentioned in that area, drilling at underground at Misery, a change in the methodology. Will that impact how the ore goes through the mill? You mentioned sort of similar grades, but that change. How are you seeing that?
The processing side of it won't be that much of an impact. If not, we believe the work index could be lower than what we had in the RVK. We are transitioning out of RVK to CK. There is a zone that actually has, it's been very difficult to drill through. Those are really the areas that the caving is high, and the integrity of the rock is pretty low. I would say we can either meet or exceed the processing rates with the new ore coming from Misery.
Great. That's all the questions on the platform. That's all I have. I've just gone over the 45 minutes, so we might leave it there. I think just to summarize, it looks like getting some good price or some encouraging price signals coming through. I guess there's still some uncertainty around the transition to the Point Lake open pit, but we should have that resolved in the current quarter.
Also, much of the capital that was spent in 2024 is now out of the way to start really mining in earnest at Point Lake and continuing underground mining at Misery. You mentioned a bunch of productivity improvements coming through. Obviously, the Point Lake being shallow to begin with and also its co-location with Misery around 2 km away. I think that's positive. Gents, really appreciate your time today. I don't think if I missed anything there, Brad, that you want to call out?
No, I think that was a good summary, Stuart. Thanks for that.
Great. Potentially some more news on balance sheet initiatives as well. Thanks, everyone, for joining the call.
Thanks, Stuart. Thanks, everyone, for joining.
Thanks, Brad. Thanks, Pooya.
Have a good one.