Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Michael O’Keeffe. I’m Executive Chairman of Champion Iron Limited. I’ll be serving as Chair of today’s meeting. It’s now 7:00 A.M. in Sydney and 5:00 P.M. in Montreal. Despite the gentleman on my right pushing me, we’re on time, not one minute early. I welcome you all to the annual general meeting of the company. I’m advised we have a quorum, being two registered shareholders, and as such, I now declare the annual general meeting open. Joining me today are other directors attending in person, Mr. David Cataford on my left, our Chief Executive Officer, Michelle Cormier, Ms. Louise Gondon, Jessica McDonald sitting in the front here. Other members of management are also joining us today. Steve Boucratie on my right, Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary. Mr. Michael Marcotte, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Capital Markets. Mr.
Alexandre Belleau, Chief Operating Officer. Mr. Donald Tremblay, Chief Financial Officer. Ms. Angela Scuticatis, Senior Vice President, Human Resources. And Jorge Estepa, Assistant Corporate Secretary, all the way from Toronto. Mr. Patrick Bernard-Darroux, a partner at Ernst & Young, the company’s auditor, is also present at the meeting to take questions you may have in relation to the conduct of the audit, the preparation and content of the auditor’s report, the accounting policies adopted by the company for the preparation of the financial statements, and the auditor’s independence in relation to the conduct of the audit. It is my pleasure to welcome everyone to the annual general meeting. I’ll let Steve, your Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary, briefly explain certain formalities regarding the conduct of the meeting. On my behalf, Mr.
Boucratie will then deal with the formal business of the meeting as outlined in the meeting materials that you all received, including voting on resolutions. Steve?
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Steve Boucratie and I am the Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary of Champion Iron Limited. The Chair has exercised his right under Rule 17.2 of the company's Constitution to call a voting by ballot on all resolutions. As a result, all voting will be conducted by ballot so that all proxy votes can be recorded. Any shareholder who has not received voting papers, please raise your hand so that the scrutineer can provide you with those. Mr. Steve Gilbert and Ms. Teresa De Luca of Computershare Investor Services, the company's transfer agent, will organize the distribution of voting papers and can provide guidance on the completion of those voting papers if required.
We will move to the agenda items of the meeting, which we are considering today while the voting by ballot is being conducted, meaning that shareholders with voting papers may vote at any time during the meeting, and when voting closes, we will ask shareholders to raise their hand to return the ballots to the scrutineers, which will then be counted by Computershare. As a reminder, as with any in-person meeting, only registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders are permitted to vote or ask questions at the meeting. I would now like to outline the format of today's meeting. First, I will deal with the formal business of the meeting as outlined in the meeting materials that all of you have received, including voting on resolutions.
After we conduct a formal portion of the meeting, we will be pleased to answer questions you may have or respond to your comments regarding the matters addressed during a formal part of the meeting. Second, after the Q&A period is concluded, Mr. David Cataford, our CEO, will provide a brief corporate overview of activities in our recently completed 2025 financial year and Q1 of financial year 2026. Upon the request of the Chair, I will also act as Secretary of the Meeting, and Mr. Steve Gilbert and Ms. Teresa De Luca of Computershare will act as scrutineers. The notice of meeting and the management information circular were dispatched to shareholders, filed electronically with the ASX and on SEDAR+, and placed on our website.
The financial statements for the year ended March 31, 2025, and the annual report for the year ended March 31, 2025, which includes the remuneration report at pages 68 through 114, have also been filed with the ASX and on SEDAR+ and placed on our website. These materials are taken as read. The formal business of this meeting consists of receiving and considering the company's financial report, together with the director's report and auditor's report for the financial year ended March 31, 2025, adopting the remuneration report as set out in the annual report of the company for the financial year ended March 31, 2025, and electing eight directors under eight separate resolutions. To expedite the formal part of the meeting, I will briefly describe or discuss each agenda item in the same sequential order in which they appear in the notice of meeting.
I do not propose to read aloud each proposed resolution. These are contained in the notice of meeting, which has been taken as read. While this procedure will facilitate the handling of the formal resolutions, registered shareholders or duly proxy and registered proxy holders may raise comments or questions on any resolution before the meeting. Under the Australian Corporations Act, the company is obligated to present before this meeting the last audited financial statements and reports for the financial year ended March 31, 2025. The tabled copy of the audited financial statements and reports, including the director's report and the auditor's report, are available for review by registered shareholders or duly appointed and registered proxy holders at this meeting. The reports are tabled but are not the subject of a resolution.
However, we will be pleased to receive any comments or questions concerning the financial statements or the reports, which we will address at the general Q&A session at the end of this meeting. Questions may also be asked of the auditors in relation to the conduct of the audit, the preparation and content of the auditor's report, the accounting policies adopted by the company for the preparation of the financial statements, and the auditor's independence in relation to the conduct of the audit. The second item of business is a Corporations Act requirement to consider a non-binding advisory vote on Champion 's remuneration report, as set out in the annual report for the financial year ended March 31, 2025. The Chair has authorized me to open the voting on this resolution, and I now do so. We ask you to please vote on your ballots.
The tabled copy of the annual report is available for review by registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders at this meeting. The remuneration report can be found at pages 68 through 114 of the annual report. The reading of such report will be dispensed with. I would like to remind shareholders that the vote on this resolution is advisory only and does not bind the company or its directors. Acknowledging that all directors have an interest in the outcome of this item of business, the directors recommend voting in favor of the adoption of the remuneration report. The next item of business, as contained in resolutions two through nine of the notice of meeting, is the appointment of directors for the current year. The Chair has authorized me to open the voting on these resolutions, and I now do so.
We ask you to please vote on your ballot for each resolution. Under the company's Constitution, for such time as the company's shares are listed for trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, all directors must retire annually and may offer themselves for reelection at the annual general meeting. Each of the directors standing for reelection at this meeting was appointed at the last annual general meeting of the company. The notice of meeting and related materials contain the names and details of the proposed nominees to the Board of Directors, who are: Mr. Michael O’Keeffe, Mr. David Cataford, Mr. Gary Lawler, Ms. Michelle Cormier, Ms. Louise Gondon, Ms. Jessica McDonald, Mr. Joy Tesh-George, and Mr. Ronnie Beaver.
The directors recommend that shareholders vote in favor of resolutions two through nine to appoint the respective nominees as directors of the company, except that each director does not make any recommendation as to how shareholders should vote on the respective resolution relating to his or her appointment. As previously mentioned, voting today is conducted by ballot. The ballot will be closing shortly. We would ask everyone who has not voted on the ballot to finish voting. We ask that all shareholders raise their hand to return their ballots to the scrutineer. I now declare the ballot vote if no one has any ballots to return. We will proceed with the Q&A session while the scrutineers tally the results of the ballot on each resolution. Is there any question? As there are no questions, I will now hand over to Mr.
Jorge Estepa, our Assistant Corporate Secretary, to provide the voting results on each resolution.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jorge Estepa. I'm the Assistant Corporate Secretary of Champion Iron Limited. The scrutineers, Computershare Investor Services, have provided me with the preliminary results of the tabulation of the votes with respect to each of the resolutions considered at today's meeting. The scrutineers confirmed the following preliminary voting results: the remuneration report for the financial year ended March 31, 2025, has not been adopted, and more than 25% of the votes cast have been cast against the resolution, meaning the company has received its first strike. Each of the eight director nominees received the required percentage of votes for.
Thank you. I declare each of the resolutions considered at this meeting in respect of those matters as carried other than the adoption of the remuneration report. The exact number of votes cast in respect of each matter will be publicly disseminated and announced, including on the ASX, filed on SEDAR+, and made available on our website as soon as possible after the conclusion of this meeting. As there is no further business, this ends the annual general meeting of the company for 2025, which I now declare closed. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our shareholders for their continued support over the past year, as well as our employees for their commitment and their diligence, and we look forward to reporting on our ongoing progress during the current financial year.
Also, I would like to remind everyone that we had planned to provide a corporate overview of activities in our recently completed 2025 financial year and Q1 of financial 2026. Following the formal part of the meeting, our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. David Cataford, will now begin the presentation.
Thank you, Steve. Thanks, everyone, for being here today. I'm very happy to be able to present the highlights for your company for the fiscal year 2025. In terms of highlights, if we look at last year, we managed to produce just shy of 14 million tons and managed to sell just shy of 13.5 million tons. The EBITDA for the year was around $470 million, resulting in a net income of $142 million.
In terms of positioning our company properly during the year, what's important, we continue to work very hard on our license to operate, which means to work with local communities, First Nations groups, and be able to strengthen our relationship so that we can not only operate now but continue to operate in the future and potentially expand with our growth projects. Some main highlights for the year are that we were, again, 100% compliant with our tailings management. We also have 99% of mining wastewater that's been reused or recycled, which makes us one of the leading mining industries in the world. If we look at the main highlights for the year, the milestones, it's been quite a challenging year.
If we go back at the beginning, the year started with a very big forest fire that had us stop the operations and manage the site to make sure that we could keep not only everybody safe but also keep all of our equipment safe. I'm happy in the way that we've managed the situation and extremely proud of the way that everybody worked together, not only as a group but also with local communities and with governments, to make sure that we keep everybody safe. At the same time, we're able to protect our assets, and we were also able to, once we were granted permission by the government, do this very efficiently, very quickly, to be able to get back in normal operations. We then had another impact in December, the first time that we had an operational element that stopped the rail for roughly around two weeks.
Realistically, when you look at the advantage of this, is that we found one of the only last places that we saw a bigger risk at our operations, managed to fix it very quickly. We now have a procedure to be able to fix it in the future if something would happen again. This continues to strengthen our logistics chain, which we've proven in the past months is able to now surpass the actual production at our site. We continue paying our dividends through the year, so our capital return strategy remained unchanged during the year, continuing to pay our two semiannual dividends of $0.10 per share. We also did some pretty instrumental growth portions during the year. If we look at one of the main highlights, not every year you could say that a company our size managed to sign a very good deal with two major Japanese companies.
We managed to be able to sell down half or a little less than half of our Kami project for roughly about $245 million to Nippon Steel and Sojitz, which are now committed to be able to continue working with us to be able to develop the assets in the future. The next steps for Kami is to be able to finalize the permitting and also finalize the feasibility study so that in 2026, we're in a position to be able to potentially take a final investment decision for the project. Another highlight is that we've also managed to recently complete an offering of $500 million of senior unsecured notes. The first time that we entered the high-yield market, the response was very positive, and it allowed us to also meet new investors and new partners to be able to accompany us in the future.
Speaking about future, when we look at the way that we structured the company last year, we are at the end. Sorry, Michael. I usually have Michael switching the slides for me. Michael, Marcotte, yeah. Sorry, Mr. Chair. When we look at our balance sheet, we've always kept the balance sheet in very good position. Again, today we have over $700 million of available liquidities, which more than allows us to finalize our major project of delivering a flotation plant to continue on our growth initiatives. The company is very well positioned to not only finalize this project but also continue looking at other growth initiatives in the future. If we turn to the flotation plant, I think this is going to be the main highlight for the next year.
If you look at our company in the past years, I think we've successfully delivered plant number one, plant number two, set the foundation of our company to be able to produce a high-grade iron ore. We quickly saw that this was not high enough in terms of grade if we want to maximize the premiums and the returns for our shareholders. We started working about two years ago on the construction of a flotation plant, which I'm happy to announce today we're still on track to deliver the project in December of this year, which would, at the end of this calendar year, make it our third major project that we deliver on time and on budget.
Speaking of this project, I think one of the main highlights for the next year will be securing new offtake contracts with various groups to be able to, one, sell our tons closer to home in markets like Europe, North Africa, and Middle East. Our main focus now is to be able to market this material to make sure that we're ready next April when we start delivering our first tons of this new 69% iron product. In terms of the Kami project, as we mentioned, secured a deal with two of the major companies from Japan, Nippon Steel and Sojitz, which have been long-term partners of Champion for many years. We've been selling tons to Nippon Steel from Bloom Lake since 2012 and more recently since Champion has owned the actual asset. Nippon Steel was our first contract that we signed when we restarted the operation.
We've continued that relationship to the extent that they now are investing alongside us to be able to deliver a project in Northern Quebec/Labrador. What's interesting as well, which we might not have caught here, is that when this deal was announced, Nippon Steel also in tandem did a press release in Japan stating that they looked around the world and this was the best project that they wanted to align themselves with to be able to develop their green steel strategy. Why is this important to be able to maximize the grade? It's mainly due to the fact that when we look at other hubs around the world, the other hub, the quality is declining. We recently saw even the P62, which we've gone to know and some people have gone to understand very well, is now becoming the P61 because the quality has declined significantly in Australia.
We also saw other companies in Brazil announce recently that they're lowering the quality. We will be there with a higher quality material to either help those companies blend the lower quality ore that they have and to allow our clients to make steel in a more CO2-efficient way. If we look at financial year 2026, what's our focus? We talked a little bit about growth initiatives, but the main focus this year is to make sure that we can operate as well as we did in the past. We had a few hiccups when you look at the past quarters, and we want to make sure that we're back on track to be able to deliver the results that we have proven to do year in and year out. We also want to work very hard on controlling our costs.
We have seen that that's one of the elements that we definitely need to put attention on. I've personally spent time at site. Alex , our COO, has been going quite often as well, working with the teams to make sure that we support everyone so that we can get back to proper operating costs to be able to make sure that we generate significant margins for our shareholders. Our big focus, as we mentioned, was to be able to sell and to sign the contracts for our new DRPF material. That's going to be one of the key elements and continue working on the Kami project to eventually deliver the feasibility study and also the permitting. All in all, this wraps up the short presentation that we have here for the year.
I think just on closing remarks on my side before I hand over to Michael O’Keeffe, our Chair, just to thank all of our employees for the amount of hard work that they've done this year. It's pretty incredible all the challenges that came month after month, and I think we've demonstrated that we've got an amazing team to be able to weather through those difficult times and be able to keep the smile and keep working hard to be able to tackle those challenges. Thanks, everyone. Over to you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks, David. It's nice reflecting back on things for the year when I hear you talking about quickly some of the projects that have happened and what the company's been able to achieve. More importantly, you and your team. Through that process, we've had a change in the First Nations chief, and David and his team have had to manage through that, which one would think that would be an easy transition. Like politicians, you know everyone comes in, they want to bang the table and complain about the things they don't have. I think it's very important that David remind them of the things that they do have and what we've been able to achieve. We're proud to employ most First Nations between us and Arcelor and also IOC in the area.
The work that David does with going to all of the fairs and festivals with them, developing new community centers, it's been quite amazing. My point is that it doesn't come easily. As David knows, sometimes he comes to my office quite frustrated, but the time taken is worth every bit of it, and it's a great achievement. Environmentally, it's amazing. Given the stringent restrictions that we have, we can't spill a teaspoon of water, but it has to be all recycled. You saw the infrastructure that's gone into those dams. Alex likes building things, but I said, "Listen, that's another level." It is another level. If you look at the next province, they dump straight into the lakes. We can't put a teaspoon there. It's not an easy thing to manage. Louise knows this very well from the mining industry. We're in a different position.
We're not dealing with cyanides and other—it's quite benign material. However, we comply, and we comply very well. It's not easy to do that. I'd just like to highlight that. Also, David and the teams who work with the federal government trying to—while we're producing this high-grade iron ore at a 69%, it really—everyone's forgotten since Trump got in and started talking about digging holes and burning more fossil fuel, etc., etc. Everyone seems to have forgotten all of the protocols and the environmental protocols that have been set by various world governments. It's taken a backburner. The sexiness of our company seems to have gone onto the backburner a little bit with that too, because let's not forget that we're producing a 69% Fe, spending a lot of shareholders' money to get to that point so that this material can go to electric arc furnaces to reduce emissions.
I mean, who else is doing that? Not a lot of people. We made this decision as a board two years ago or 18 months ago to go forward with this after having brought on, as David said, phase I, phase II, and we've done that all out of cash flow and good operating procedures through the company. It is quite a great achievement. We're absolutely determined in the process of getting to the emissions targets that we have set ourselves, and also which is going to allow the steel industry to be able to do that. The federal government, I think, is now starting to understand that. What we say to them is, if you look at our cost to get to that stage, it's quite large. As everyone knows, it's $50 - $60 a ton FOB. That doesn't come lightly because we have a processing plant.
If you're sitting in the Pilbara, of course, they dig it out of the ground, crush it, put it on a ship, and send it away. A bit of screening goes in there. It goes into a blast furnace and produces the emissions. If the world's happy to adopt that and keep it there, let's not talk about Christ's Ark crying about emissions. I'm sorry for the rant, but people seem to forget why we're heading to this goal of lower emissions. We're well and truly on the way to doing that. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing so bad that's going to stop us meeting the goals, as we've done with all of our projects, on time, on budget.
In early next year, we'll be commissioning the plant, or Alex will be, and I'll be hoping getting a nice phone call that says everything's going well. It is very, very important. What the federal government and the Quebec government are learning is that in that area where we are, we not only have the Kami project that David talked about, but also we have a vast array of other resources there, which we call Cluster 3. This is lifetime for our great-grandchildren and producing the high-grade material. We have to have support on transport and logistics, which is what we're talking to the governments about. We can't be paying all this money to IOC for them to enjoy nice dividends when there's a more rational way of doing things for our transport.
Also, our shipping will come down if we're delivering to Europe with the high-grade material, and we're not sending all of our tons to China. There is fantastic opportunity. Let's hope the world sticks with their demands on emissions, and we'll play into that beautifully. We want to be paid accordingly for it. That's very important to us. That's the strategy of the high-grade. Costs are obviously an issue, as I spoke about. You know we are a high-cost producer, but our product is a very high-grade material that demands a high-grade price. The journey goes on. We hope for you at the next AGM, we're sitting here talking to you about how successful it was and how much reward we're getting for that and how much bigger dividends we can pay, which I'll be very happy about, by the way.
On that note, without ranting too much, I'd like to close, but thank all of the employees of the board for their support and, most importantly, the shareholders. Thank you very much.