I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Bill Beament, Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thanks for joining us on the call today. We have myself and our Chief Financial Officer, Ben MacKinnon. Four and a half years since I did my last con call for a quarterly, so it's good to engage the activity again, and I might be a little bit rusty, so go easy on me, please. Today's strong results show that we are well on track to meet the key growth targets set out in our five-year business plan. This is due in part to the highly successful production ramp-up that is underway at Woodlawn, where we are set to reach a nameplate capacity of 850,000 tons per annum in the March quarter. It also reflects the rapid progress at our Sulphur Springs project during the quarter and the mining services contract we recently secured with OceanaGold in New Zealand.
We are two years into our five-year business plan, and we are set to reach our goal of producing 500,000 tons of copper equivalent a year on or ahead of schedule. The business plan also sets out a goal of having two to three mining services contracts, and we now already have two. And finally, the sharp recovery in lithium prices means we will also stand to achieve the goal on that front as well, and I'll talk more about that later. I will now provide some detail on the key points in the quarterly that I can elaborate on, and then ask our CFO, Ben MacKinnon, to provide insights on financials as we take questions. I'll start with some key points that we put out today.
Our Woodlawn restart continues to perform strongly with commissioning and ramp-up on schedule, and we really are putting that project on track for steady-state production, as we've identified and told the market last year for the March quarter. This is demonstrated by a record 59,000 tons processed in the month of December, which really gives us a great exit rate at Woodlawn to reach a nameplate capacity of 850,000 tons per annum in this quarter. Pleasing to see, our quarterly concentrate revenue was up 98.5% to AUD 39.1 million from 9,500 tons of con sales, and this was driven by increases of 36% in copper con and 43% in zinc con compared to the September quarter, and that was really driven by the introduction and the increase of high-grade production from our main Kate Lens.
One of the things that should be noted in the base metal sector is there's substantial ongoing falls in treatment and refining costs that we get charged from our off-takers called TCs and RCs. They are delivering significant gains to the Woodlawn financial outlook for this calendar year. As of 1 January, Develop now reverts to spot market indices for treatment and refining, with copper and lead trading well into the negatives, and zinc is really at historical lows for treatment charges. Also, if we look at just the new treatment and refining costs and today's spot commodity prices, our increase in net smelter return revenue, that's our revenue per ton that we look after our off-taker costs and transport costs, that has increased 40% to now AUD 470 a ton from our published restart in August 2024, so a huge uptick in revenue per ton.
The other thing is we only just recently started our drilling at Woodlawn. We did nearly 10,000 meters, and that was actually just grade control drilling. Our second drill doesn't start until later this quarter, and that's the one that we've put in there to grow our mine plan from 10-15 years at Woodlawn, but that hasn't started yet. But our grade control drilling actually hit another lens called the N Lens, and we've got some fantastic results that we've just published that are outside resources, and that is going to be a near-term mining area that will come into the plan in the next 3-6 months. And we also have got a number of intercepts in the I and D Lens that are outside resources as well.
The grade control drilling, as we thought, as we further drill into this ore body, we're finding more and more mineralization. Sulphur Springs has been rapidly progressed during the last quarter. We did an updated DFS in the December quarter and produced a pre-tax NPV value of AUD 921 million. That was a substantial 76% increase on the previous one done in June 2023. What I would like to point out is that since we put that out in October, the spot prices of copper and silver are up 20% and 150% higher than what we assumed in the DFS, and the zinc price is around about the same, it's probably about $100 higher at the moment.
The thing that I want to emphasize on this as well is when we start talking and looking at ratios of commodities and where they sit in their current form, and it's interesting knowing people talk about gold and silver ratios, and a lot of people doing that at the moment, silver's coming up to historical sort of levels in that. But the interesting thing we look at is the zinc and copper ratio and the zinc and aluminum ratio are at historical lows. So zinc has not had the rally like other commodities are having, but they are sitting at this, and I'll give you an example. Less than 10 years ago, the zinc and copper ratio was about 0.5. It's now sitting at 0.25.
Either copper's coming down or zinc's going up, and I don't think many people think copper's coming down, and aluminum's gone from 1.6- 1. So as Trafi pointed out to me in Geneva last week, that is not the norm. So they're very bullish on zinc and where it could go to. The other part on Sulphur Springs, if we were just to put spot commodity prices, exchange rate, and current treatment costs into the pre-tax NPV that we only put out in October, it would be up another 25% to AUD 1.15 billion, and Bill can talk about the funding of this later on because those sort of NPVs make funding a lot easier than a couple of years ago. The other thing we just put out today was some metallurgical geotechnical drilling that we did through the ore body at Sulphur Springs.
It hit exceptionally high-grade copper, zinc, and silver mineralization, really reinforcing the scale and quality of this project. I'd just like to point out 204 meters at 1.8% copper, 0.6 lead, 6.2 zinc, 21 grams per ton silver, which is the resource grade and the mine plan grade of Sulphur Springs, and will probably produce over 1.2-1.3 million ounces a year of silver at Sulphur Springs when it's up and running and a bit of gold. But when you start breaking the increments down, there's some really high-grade zones in there. That resource is going to grow just from that hole alone. It's worth noting that 49 meters of that intersection at really good grades at 1.8 copper and 15% zinc and an ounce and a bit of silver sits outside of the current resource.
We also hit a full ore lens in there, which has opened up a whole new horizon in that ore body. As we knew when we start drilling this thing, it's going to grow, so we can't wait to get the drill rigs later in the year when we get the positions in the new decline to continue to drill this because this was part of our strategy as well to grow this from an 8- to 15-year mine plan. The quality of this system is amazing. Final investment decision is targeted for June quarter 2026, which is next quarter. I understand we're very, very busy putting this all together, so it's coming together extremely well.
And Pioneer Dome, it's amazing how quick commodities can change, and that was the whole idea of putting our portfolio together over the last three or four years is we've seen a significant increase in the spodumene price. A couple of days, I think yesterday, it hit $2,500. It closed, I think, $2,420 per ton of SC6 overnight. And also the interesting part is the re-emergence of the DSO, the direct ship ore market, has well and truly opened. This has created an outstanding financial opportunity at this project. Please remember, we have a fully permitted mine. We can dig a pit now. Very different to a lot of other projects. We've got traditional owner agreements. We've got all our mining approvals through. We can start a pit now. So it's fully permitted. It would take less than six months to deliver first DSO ore.
Remind you, the capital cost of that whole project is about AUD 35 million-AUD 40 million to get up and running. We'll talk a little bit more in Q&A on that. We've already started full entry off-take negotiations, project financing, and planning of pre-development activities. That's been activated. We have term sheets in our inbox as we speak, and we'll get another one later on this week. That market has radically changed. Onto our mining services, we've got our second contract, a AUD 200 million tunneling contract with OceanaGold at the Waihi North Project, probably one of the best, highest-grade undeveloped gold projects in the world. We really thank OceanaGold for entrusting us to deliver that project for them. That's a major cornerstone thing for us.
It's amazing how that has just opened up New Zealand for other opportunities on the east coast of Australia. There's a substantial volume of tenders currently being assessed to progress. You couldn't get a more favorable market for mining services providers than right now, with gold sitting at $5,180 an ounce across the globe. You could mine the gravel in the car park at the moment and make money out of it. It's that bloody high. Corporately, as I said, really important. The December quarter marks our second-year anniversary of our five-year business plan, under which we're targeting a 50,000 ton copper equivalent. Based on the results today, we believe that we're well and truly tracking our turn of schedule, if not ahead of it. The plan also targets two or three mining services.
We now have two, and I'd be surprised if we don't have three soon, potentially four. December quarter, group external revenue was at record, nearly AUD 95 million. We have a lot of discussions going on. We are growing our business, a lot of corporate opportunities in our space. And last but not least, we've boosted up the team. We're growing this thing very, very rapidly. We've got a lot of new projects and a lot of opportunities, and we're great to have our highly credentialed mining executive Duncan Bradford join the board as non-exec director. Nathan Stoitis. Is anyone in the extractive hard rock metallurgy business industry knows Nathan's background as our GM of processing and metallurgy, and Fraser Perry has joined as our General Manager of Business Development. And he's a very busy boy.
So from that, I will now pass over the moderator to open up for questions, please.
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. And if you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Joseph House from Bell Potter Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions, Bill and Ben. Congrats on a strong quarterly update. Just first one, just around head grades, are you able to provide any commentary around how that kind of progressed during the quarter and how they compare to the September quarter for Woodlawn?
Yeah, Joseph, a very good question. Yeah. So look, we'll give 0.1, we'll give a lot more granularity coming the March quarter because we're really hitting steady state and normality there. But you can see that revenue's up 98.5% quarter-on-quarter. Con sales, you can see are up 36% and 43%. So expect that the grades come up quite substantially. Otherwise, we can't get those increases in revenue and concentrate production in tons and metal. And lead was down a little bit, the con. I think it was down 29%, but more than offset by the pick ups. And it's timing of what lenses we put through.
So the key thing here is there's a lot bigger contribution from the September quarter with the Kate Lens coming into production, and that is expected to grow another 50% of the stope production quantum in the March quarter as we keep ramping up the main production lens.
That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. And just with respect to the current silver price environment, the spot being nearly $110 an ounce, do you think any differently around the processing strategy, maybe prioritizing silver recoveries over less valuable metals, or is that too complex?
It's a very interesting question, Joseph. So yeah, and it's a good point to note that with Woodlawn up and running in steady state and throwing Sulphur Springs, we'll end up doing on average 2 million ounces of silver per year. So it's a really meaningful revenue bloody byproduct for us. So are we doing anything different? No, but the other we're obviously trying to maximize recoveries and get it into the respective cons because silver, you want to get into your copper and your lead con because when you're going to use zinc, as you know, your deductibilities, I think everyone's about the same. They get about a 3-ounce deductibility in zinc.
So yeah, are we trying to get it going into the first two cons? Absolutely before it gets to the third. And we are getting the vast chunk of our recovery into that and probably getting better con grades than we expected for silver. Probably the thing to note is when you are getting negative, and I mean substantially negative treatment costs and refining costs for copper and lead, just think processing-wise, more tons you get paid from the smelter for the time. Expect that we're maximizing recoveries into concentrate regardless of we're balancing that con grade and extra tons, but we're getting paid for the extra tons for the smelter. So it's a bit of a win-win for the miner and probably a lose-lose for the smelter. But we are managing that extremely well.
It's a great position to be in from that perspective. Is the TC/RCs locked in at this stage, or do you kind of take a spot price on those TC/RCs? Are you able to quantify the potential earnings tailwind over calendar year 2026?
So Joe, we moved to a spot-based index in calendar year 2026. So in calendar year 2025, we had fixed TC/RCs under our off-take contract with Trafigura. And this year, we moved to a spot-based index. So there is significant savings to be made in that. In terms of quantum, we're not articulating those yet, and we will do maybe down the track with some guidance.
Yep, no problem. And just one last question. Given the favorable backdrop for the mining services business, do you have enough bandwidth to potentially secure a third contract that's similar size in terms of value and even term as the OceanaGold Corp contract, or are you looking at something maybe potentially a bit smaller?
Yeah, good question. Look, we definitely have bandwidth. People haven't been an issue for us, but I can say as a sector wide, it's extremely tight. Never seen it tighter ever in my career. And as you appreciate, $7,400 gold price, every single open pit has an underground hanging off it now around the world. But the big contracts aren't necessarily the most profitable, Joseph. So quite often, the boutique smaller ones, you make way better margin and with a lot less stress and a lot less hassle. So you don't just have to pick a big contract to make good margin. But that said, got the bandwidth there, and most importantly, got the equipment because there is no equipment. If you didn't put orders in a couple of years ago, good luck to you.
You're going to the second-hand market and buying a five-year-old loader or a truck, which you're going to pay the price for that. So we've got the equipment. We've got the people. We've got the management. We've got our DNA. We just put Duncan Bradford on the board as a non-executive to run Byrnecut offshore. Shannon Bunn used to work offshore and run all the Byrnecuts after Duncan.
He's now been our CO for three and a half years, and my background everyone knows is a mining contract as well. So we've got very deep expertise and networks in the people and management side of the mining services. But again, we've already got two contracts. We don't want to be big in it. There is a lot of work, and you need to be very disciplined in that space at the moment because wages are going up across industry in certain categories, and the gold guys can afford to pay it. And if you want talent, they're going to have to pay for it. So we'll even change contract structures to reflect that. We'll even probably start putting jumbo prices in as a fixed line item so we can have a negotiation as people start jacking the rates up because they're already jacking up right now.
So you just got to be really smart about what you're doing and what you target and where you go. But we've been very disciplined in what we're looking at. We just want to work with good projects, good people, and make sure that we can make our margin and the mine owner gets what they deserve as well. And then everyone succeeds.
Joe, the other thing just to be wary of that is just making sure we balance off our needs for our own contracts as well. So mining services is a great part of our business, but the true value creation in our business is in our asset ownership, so our mines. So it is just making sure that we have enough people to operate our assets as well, which we need to be aware of, particularly with potentially Pioneer Dome coming on board. Yeah.
Understood. Great. I'll leave it there. Thanks again, gents. Well done. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one and wait for your name to be announced. We'll pause for any further questions to register. Thank you. Your next question comes from Hayden Bairstow from Argonaut. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Bill, just a question on the disclosure at Woodlawn. Obviously, this quarter, we've got concentrate tons. Last quarter, it was metal tons with some rough grades. Just keen to understand why the disclosure is not the same quarter on quarter. So it's just easier to follow what's going on as you ramp it up.
Yeah, look, good question. As I said, obviously, March quarter is that steady state quarter. So we will give the full suite of tables, and we'll probably go down the lines of how Sandfire report, to be honest. I think this is probably, I guess, the shining light of template. So that will be in from the March quarter onwards. Yeah, probably the one thing we did miss is just the concentrate grades. They're exactly the same as September quarter ranges that we gave there of copper, zinc, and lead. So nothing's changed from that side. That was probably just a little bit of an oversight, to be honest, Hayden.
Okay. And just on the revenue result, my question for Benny, I guess, I presume there's some provisional pricing kicks on some of this stuff from the previous quarter, given everything went up pretty hard during the December quarter.
Yeah, there was some price increase, but it was mainly driven out of volume based from the concentrate revenue point of view, Hayden. I think we mentioned in our last, well, maybe in some discussions we had with you, we had a large delivery of copper concentrate early in October as well. That just missed the September quarter and fell into the December quarter. It was predominantly based off volume, but absolutely there's some pricing increase as well. We're seeing our realised price, particularly in copper, come up significantly. We'll see that continue to rise as we take advantage of the latest price increase we've seen in the last couple of weeks. Yeah. I think our provisional for copper was AUD 1,607,100, I think, where it's now. It's getting close to AUD 9.5-20. So yeah, you're right. There was a bit of provisional pricing in there.
Yeah. And then just on Pioneer Dome, I mean, there's obviously two obvious plants that could go into. I mean, are you aware where you're at with those discussions, or are they just about to start in terms of trying to get access to the one that's running or the one that's not?
We're doing all three options at the moment. We've engaged that very quickly, Hayden. Is point one, we will talk about mine gate and treating through other areas. So that's already started. We are now dusting off looking at building our own plant because we always said in the original scoping study, north of $1,500 spod, it was really that was sort of the tipping point. We're now sitting at $2,425. So we are investigating that. But the DSO market is open.
We have been offered money in term sheets from two very large off-takers in the last week. So that's very, very interesting. That market is open, and it's very aggressive, very aggressive at the moment. So that's not been a surprise, but it's hit pretty quick. And when you start understanding what those DSO rates are per ton, Jesus Christ, it's just about as good as gold mining.
Yeah. And do you have a preliminary agreement with, assuming it was offshore, with the Esperance Port to do that already?
Sorry, I missed that, Hayden.
Do you have a preliminary agreement with the Esperance Port then if you're going to go down that route?
No, we don't have an agreement with them at the moment, but discussions have commenced around getting access to the Esperance Port. And obviously, with MinRes having some spots come up free there, there will be some access to the Esperance Port available. Okay. There's actually a fair bit of access.
Yeah. We've already got quotes off one very large logistics provider, and then there's also another logistics provider that was supposed to get it to me yesterday, but it'll come today. So that's a, yeah, full turn from mine to ship.
All right. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Beament for closing remarks.
Thanks. And thanks for everyone joining on Develop's first quarterly call in four and a half years. It's good to be back in the realm and talk to analysts. So hopefully, the other analysts listening there can use this information and start initiating coverage. So very great quarter for Develop, probably our busiest quarter in the history of Develop. Very exciting year moving forward. Please take time to read the quarterly. We have three amazing projects and a mining service division that's going from strength to strength. I think we are setting ourselves up to be the preeminent base metal mining company on the ASX that investors need to own. So with that, I'll close the call, and thanks again for joining us.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.