I would now like to hand the conference over to Bill Beament, Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks Travis, and welcome to our second quarterly conference call on activities of DEVELOP. Hopefully I don't drop out. I'm on site at Bellevue, so the comms are good. Hopefully they're paying their IT bill. Look, we're deep into the first quarter of this business. We're coming up nearly to our four-year anniversary of mining services establishment, and when we got the keys at Woodlawn. We're only four to six weeks off finishing that first quarter. It's been an extremely busy sort of quarter that we're going to go through today. As you can see, there's a lot of information and a lot of activity. I'll start with declaring commercial production at our first mine that we've now completed building. Woodlawn has reached a steady state.
We achieved that in the March quarter, and that's what we articulated, and we set that target last year for our shareholders in the market. It's extremely pleased and proud of the DEVELOP team in delivering Woodlawn to steady state. That was culminated off with record performance in the month of March. We mined over 80,000 tonnes for the month. We processed 78,000 tonnes for the month. We've really successfully even stress-tested above the nameplate of this operation in a mining and a processing run rate. Our copper equivalent production was 17,000 tonnes per annum, and that will increase further, and I'll go through that in a minute. We had extremely strong quarter-on-quarter ramp up from our December quarter. Our ore tonnes mined were up 46%. Our mined grade was up 41%. Our processing tonnes were up 25%.
Our concentrate production was up 50%. Our value of metal and concentrate was up 66%-68%. Our copper equivalent production was up 88%. We grew our surface stockpiles. They're now sitting at 15,000 tonne. We even had a lot of underground broken stocks. The mine is really hitting its strap. One of the other key things, and I'll get Ben to talk about this later on, our mine and port concentrate stockpiles sit around nearly 12,000 tonnes and AUD 33 million, and the vast majority of that was shipped in April and money in the bank. Our mined ore grades, they're definitely progressing very quickly towards our life of mine reserve grades. I'll point people to figure two, which is really important, which is the Kate lens.
I'll let people have a look at that in due course. We are on the edges of Kate, and now we're coming back into the main part of the ore body, so we'll expect those grades to improve quite remarkably in this quarter and beyond. Obviously, as grade goes up through the mill, that has a huge impact on our recoveries as well, and our recoveries will continue to improve. We've made huge progress on what we're producing. All our concentrate was in spec. There's a lot more room for improvement, both on mine grade. Obviously, recoveries will improve as we get into more of that Kate lens. Obviously, we end up producing a lot more metal.
We're very, very excited at how month of March went, and we're seeing great progress in the month of April, when, in fact, our recoveries and grades are already up quite substantially from the March quarter. We've been very busy on the drilling as well. Can't underestimate, we started a program last year called DN15. We want to drill and mine, and we want to take this mine plan from 10 - 15 years. The first rig went in. It was basically just grade control drilling, and that's hit another lens, N lens and M lens. Then we drilled some sterilization holes as well, right up the top of the mine and that hit the best ever intercept the mine's ever received, and that's in the quarterly report, so have a look at that.
We will follow that up, and I think we've got seven other holes we've seen into a bonanza zone at the top of the mine that we thought was barren. Very fertile system. We have a second rig coming in in this quarter, and that rig is the one that goes in the purpose-built drill drive that is near completion at the moment. That's the one that's really designed there over the next eight months to take it from a 10- 15-year mine plan. We haven't seen value creation yet in DEVELOP really with a drill bit, but you're starting to get it now. The other thing, obviously Ben will talk about, is just there's a big fall in treatment costs and refining costs across the base metals. We're seeing negatives everywhere on treatment.
We're getting paid by smelters to process our own material. It's a really extraordinary position to be in. I would think that's going to continue. On to our second project, and this is probably, again, we've now completed building our first mine, but I think people really need to be conscious of the next two mines and how quick they are going to come online and how quick we are progressing it. There's a lot of detail in this quarterly report. Our Sulphur Springs project, that is now a copper, silver, zinc project. Basically, half the revenue is copper and silver, and the other half is zinc. The underground development is rapidly progressing. We're 15% ahead of schedule. We did nearly 900 m of development during the quarter. Our engineering construction preparation's advancing extremely quick.
GR Engineering are finalizing the final engineering drawings and flow sheets now. The surface infrastructure has been cleared, rampads built. Our long lead items, so things like ball mills and MCCs and all the long lead items for the processing plant have been ordered, deposits have been paid. I've appointed a general manager. He commenced three weeks ago, and Ben will take you through the financing and offtake later on in this call. That is rapidly progressing and we're not stopping there, and we're still on track for final investment decision this quarter. Our third mine, so we're building three mines in three years. Our third mine, and I think there's nothing in our share price on this, is our Pioneer Dome lithium project. This is rapidly progressing towards a mine. As we know, the lithium price has resurged. I think it looks very sustainable moving forward.
This is even pre-Iran, let alone post-Iran, where everyone, including myself now, wants an electric car and solar panels on their roof and a big battery. It's only going to escalate and get off the fossil fuels in the future. We are going to capitalize on that. As of today, we're probably 25% through our grade control drilling. We are infill drilling the open pit, the DSO open pit, as we speak. Results have been fantastic to date, and you'll hear more on this in probably four or five weeks when we give a much fuller presentation on Pioneer Dome. The resource model integrity has been picture perfect from the geology team. Like I say, we've done 8,000+ meters of grade control drilling. The ore body's probably thicker in parts than we expected.
We did hit a third lens that we didn't know was there in our drilling. Most importantly, it's very visual when you're drilling lithium, and we're seeing no impurities. This is a really clean ore body, and we're getting intersections up to 40 m thick. It's not like some of these narrow vein stuff you've seen in industry. We've got a big, big ore body that's got geometry, and it means we don't get dilution in the ore body. Very clean product. Samples have already been to China. We've got recoveries back from offtakers and debt funders. It was shaping up extremely well. We've done budget pricing, guys, on open pit crushing port and ship loading. We know the economics around that. We are going to full form tenders. The documents will be finished this week.
We've got NDAs signed by open pit contractors, and we'll put out documents next week. I've already bought a camp that's part of our CapEx that we bought. I've got a 40-person camp that I've just purchased sitting in storage, ready to go for the mining contractor there. We just appointed a manager of mining. You can probably see that we are quickly progressing this to a mine. It's fully permitted, shovel-ready. Obviously, we've got another couple of months of grade control drilling. We're doing the final drawings and final bloody engineering from a mining engineering perspective at the moment. If I could do this thing up today or yesterday, I'd be doing it. The only thing that slows us up here is basically the mobilization of the open pit contractor. We are rapidly progressing that.
I think with what people can see of the spodumene price, and when you start seeing the C3 price of that, and it's a pretty extraordinary margin that we can make out of that. Very excited about kicking that off. Last but not least, our mining services. I couldn't say it'd be any more buoyant than what it is in that arena at the moment. Obviously, that's getting driven by record high gold prices and everyone wanting to crowd an underground in that space. Plus, a lot of other products are going underground as we speak. Ben can talk to the revenue numbers, but obviously for us, the key thing is the renewal of the Bellevue contract. All that's been submitted and qualifications have been done. Really, there should be a decision in the June quarter on that. We're very keen to stay here.
We've built the new home. We'd love to live in it for a few more years. We're very keen to keep that, and I think we've got a great workforce here. Bellevue had a great quarter last quarter, which was recognized in 19% share price growth in the day they announced that compared to market. It was an extraordinary thing. It's a really good project and they're making really good inroads here and great cash flow. We want to help them continue. We are mobilizing our second contract. We'll start the first cut and the box cut at the end of this month in New Zealand with Oceana Gold. That's been a really good mobilization. All the equipment's there. People have been no dramas. A lot of people wanted to relocate back home to New Zealand.
We've been able to supplement that talent with some other people. That's been really easy to staff up that, and OceanaGold have been an amazing client to deal with. As I said in the quarterly, we're currently tendering or negotiating this quarter on about AUD 2.5 billion worth of pipeline of tenders, which obviously includes Bellevue. Very favorable time. We're getting to the pointy end on one or two of them now. We're very excited about the landscape there. Basically, after this quarter, I think our mining services tender book can get closed and jobs done and we've got the amount of projects we want and the clients and the locations that we desire to work in. With that, I'll hand over to Ben to go through the financials.
Thank you, Bill. The revenue for the quarter, or the external revenue for the quarter was AUD 69.3 million. AUD 50 million of that was our mining service division and the remainder being our concentrate sales from the Woodlawn site. The cash balance at the end of March was AUD 30 million. There has been a larger than previous quarters draw on the cash this year. It's a story in two parts. One is sort of the growth CapEx we have with a number of the projects, and then timing issues in relation to the concentrate sales. With that growth CapEx, we're obviously building our second mine at Sulphur Springs, so we're continuing to do the decline and the site clearing work at that site. That's around AUD 12 million. We raised money last year for expansion of the Woodlawn site, so getting that second jumbo into the decline.
There's been AUD 12 million spent at Woodlawn in that growth CapEx. As Bill mentioned, we're now buying and setting up the camp for the Pioneer Dome, so that spend has occurred this month, and that camp's in storage ready to go. The Waihi project as well, so AUD 9 million has been spent on the new equipment for that Waihi project and getting that ready to go. That equipment is in country now, and they should be starting that work relatively soon. The other major element of that, of the timing issue, is to do with the concentrate sales. We had a large copper shipment and a large zinc shipment due to go at the end of March. That just fell into April with ship availability delayed due to some of the Middle East issues.
That those two shipments have left and the money has been received. If you add that back, we're actually positive from a cash flow operations point of view. Really it's that growth CapEx and just some timing issues with the concentrate sales. I guess just moving on to the other main part of the finance section is the funding process for both Pioneer Dome and Sulphur Springs. That process, which we started back in December, is going extremely well. We've had a huge number of parties interested in the process, particularly at the Pioneer Dome one, with up to 11 proposals on the Pioneer Dome debt piece and offtake piece as well.
We're still on target to have that all wrapped up in June quarter and go to the board with a fully funded decision for both Sulphur Springs and Pioneer Dome to allow FID to happen in the June quarter. The other thing that's just worth noting as well, and we've certainly seen it with this copper shipment and this zinc shipment that left in early April, is that impact of the TCRCs that you're seeing in the base metal space. It's a material change. We moved off fixed price TCRCs for calendar year 2025 onto a spot index in calendar year 2026 and going forward for the remaining offtake at Woodlawn. To give you an idea, we're looking at close to -100 realized TCRCs on the copper and mid-teens on the zinc TCRC.
Now if you go back 18 months, two years ago, zinc TCRCs were close to $250. It is a significant reduction. It's a great time for miners to be bringing new product to market. We firmly believe, having done a lot of work and looked at the smelting industry, we firmly believe these TCRCs are going to be lower for longer. The smelting industry is making very good money through by-product credits and the sulfuric acid price. Those elements will keep the TCRCs lower for longer. We certainly think it's a great time to be bringing our Woodlawn concentrate to the market, and it's an even better time to be negotiating an offtake, for a new Sulphur Springs project. That's all on the corporate. I'll pass back to Bill for closing remarks.
Questions. Yeah. Thanks, Ben. I'll hand over to Travis to open up for questions.
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 then two. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. The first question today comes from Joseph House from Bell Potter Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good day, gents. Congrats on the quarterly update and achieving steady state production at Woodlawn. Just a few questions from me. Firstly, it's good to see that the processing rates in March were roughly 10% above nameplate capacity. What's the sustainability of those processing rates? Do you think this can be maintained going forward? I can also see that you're making some investments in the flotation circuit at Woodlawn. Just wondering if that's going to potentially allow you to creep up production over time. Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Joseph. Yeah, look, obviously it was March, we knocked it out of the park and it was a good ability to stress test the mill. I think we've said before, we do know the mill can get up to probably closer to that 1 million ton per annum without any extra CapEx. Obviously, the key thing is the underground to be able to feed it. I'll stick with my 850 run rate. Because we've still got to, I guess, walk before we run. Even the mine, as we open up the stopes and get more flexibility in the mine plan, it's pretty easy to maintain that 850 and we're demonstrating that in the exit run rate in March. Very confident in how that's looking.
I think please go and have a look at the diagrams. In particular, diagram number one, figure number one in the quarterly. We've got so much spatial separation happening in this mine because we've been able to push the capital so deep, so quick. We're down now, because obviously it's a quarterly, we're now at the end of March. Sorry, end of April. We're down now 600 vertical meters below surface, and we're literally mining in G Lens 100 m below surface. Kate Lens like 250 m. I&D, we're starting to stope. Literally, we just dropped the stope from 48 hours ago in there as we speak. We're getting that real separation, giving us flex.
That's going to continue to give us more flexibility in the next three or four months as we keep bringing more and more of these I&D and N and M wings online.
Understood. Just trying to get a sense of the OpEx at Woodlawn. Would you say that the cost profile is similar to, say, the 2024 restart feasibility study, adjusted for inflation, obviously? Just wondering as well, if there's any operational efficiencies that you've realized to date that might maybe be a benefit compared to those previous forecasts?
Yeah, look, Joseph, obviously we've just declared commercial production, so I'd expect from next quarter onwards, we'll give really good visibility on the cost structure. That'll be an ongoing thing in our quarterlies, obviously. Probably to note is, obviously we're completely volume driven like any mine. The more physicals we can get out from the underground through the mill, the lower the cost. We're actually probably tracking, and Ben can confirm this, but our cost structure's actually tracking a bit lower than what we actually have budgeted, and probably what even is in that feasibility. You can adjust a little bit for inflation, but we're actually tracking lower than what we expected. That's probably due to the productivities of the underground crew. Also the dirt going through the mill has been softer. We're not using as much reagents, so things like that.
Obviously, not as much power draw. We did get, I think, a change in our power contract, Ben, from what we put in this. We are on lower grid rates than what we budgeted. All those combinations. The teams on site has done an amazing job to keep that cost structure lower. We are tracking ahead of budget on that.
Great.
All that's absolutely correct. The key delta here is the productivity that we're getting is much better than we'd budgeted, and that's driving the mining costs lower than that restart plan. That's the big delta.
Understood. Thank you. Just maybe a question for you, Ben, just around the silver stream liability. I can see that you've produced a significant increase in contained silver quarter on quarter. Maybe that's not yet flowing through into the sales and the payments for this silver stream yet. Is there any update you can provide on that and just how quickly you think you can pay that down given the current silver price outlook?
Yeah, absolutely. Just to remind everyone, we have a AUD 27 million capped silver stream. When we initially modeled this out, we were using a silver price of $25 or $26, and it was estimated it was going to take us around about four years to extinguish that silver stream. Clearly, the silver price is at much higher point than that. Our latest modeling is kind of around 18 months, we'll have it paid out. Once that gets through, we'll get the full benefit of that cash flow coming in from the silver. It was a very good part of the deal we did. Previously, that was an uncapped silver stream, but what was negotiated as a part of the purchase was to cap it at AUD 27 million, which will end up being a great outcome for the business.
We're getting through it very quickly. We made a big payment in April off the back of the copper shipments, the big copper shipment that went out. Yeah, we're getting through it at a rapid rate, Joe.
Fantastic. Okay, and lastly, just considering your relationship with Trafigura and traders, just keen to get your thoughts on the near-term market fundamentals for copper, zinc and spodumene DSO. What are you hearing and seeing? That'll be greatly appreciated.
Yeah, I'll grab that one, Ben. Yeah, so look, it's like Ben articulated, I think there's two elements here to our business and the financials is, like you said, the smelters, in particular zinc smelters, because they get more of the by-product credit revenue from silver, and they get gallium and things like that out of people's products. Obviously sulfuric acid's at record prices, and whether you're a copper or zinc smelter, you're predominantly a sulfide, sulfuric acid business. Their by-product credit revenues have gone through the roof with gold and silver, and they clip the ticket on the metals as well. Obviously metal prices have gone up, so they're having wins all around and obviously sulfuric acid. Hence they've been able to give, like you've never seen zinc TCs be in the negatives ever. You're seeing that at the moment.
Lead, Ben forgot to mention lead, but that's like negative, I think, $170 or $150 a ton. Those are coming through to the bottom line. Payabilities are probably going up a little bit as well moving forward. Like you saw that with industry doesn't know exactly what the benchmark got set with Teck and Korea Zinc the other day, but they did make comment they got better silver payability in their zinc con. There's a few of these little things coming through. It's very tight for new supply. Zinc's much tighter than copper on supply. There's no room for error in the zinc industry, whereas copper's probably got 1 million tons of stockpiles sitting between COMEX, LME and Shanghai.
Obviously, we're still probably in a disturbed market with Iran. I think post Iran, I think we're heading to a metals boom in those. Then throw in lithium, which I think is extraordinary how much people are being caught out in that space. I know internally we're talking about battery storage and now everyone's talking about it, and that's real and that technology is changing really quickly. We've just quoted up a power station in Sulphur Springs, and we're putting a whopping big battery with solar in there. It's just a no-brainer. Anyone looking at new electrical infrastructure is 100% looking at solar and big batteries. That's only going to escalate, whether that's domestic or industrial scale. No one's going backwards in that area. Obviously, there's fuel shocks just escalating electric vehicles and battery storage. Very positive.
I think by the level of activity, Ben, we're seeing with 11 proposals, and there's no funky backyard operators in those 11 proposals, I should mention, Tim. These are some of the world's biggest end users and biggest commodity traders in this space banging our door down. I think, in the next four, six weeks when we put out a few optics on the financials of Pioneer Dome, I think there's going to be a lot of very happy shareholders.
Great.
Sorry, Joe, I was going to say, I think the interest we've seen both in the Sulphur Springs funding and offtake process and the Pioneer Dome process is a really good indication of where the metals market is. It's very tight at the moment. If you are bringing new product into the market, it is highly sought after, and you can get it at competitive or at very competitive rates and payability. Yeah, we're very bullish on the metals space.
Understood. Okay, great. That's great color . Thank you, and congrats again.
Thanks.
Thank you once again. To register a question, please press star one on your phone. The next question comes from Hayden Bairstow from Argonaut. Please go ahead.
Morning, chaps. Bill, just a couple of things on Sulphur Springs and the DSO of them, and how you're looking at scheduling development. I mean, Sulphur Springs looks like it's already underway and you're about to press the button. How do you work in the timing on what you're doing at Pioneer Dome, or is it just a smaller scale op, so it's not taking that many people?
Yeah, look, that's exactly right, Hayden. Pioneer Dome is like, I think the bottom of the J curve, we've worked out it's about AUD 30. Not in, and we're very close to finalizing all the offtake and debt on that. We could do it off our existing balance sheet if we want. It's only a small open pit. It's very similar to what Cygnus announced. It's like a 5-to-1 strip ratio. There's 800,000 tonnes in the starter pit. It's a pretty simple execution, and all we're doing is in our outcrops. It's just a bloody small operation for an open pit contractor and crush, screen, and put on road trains and send to port. It's a very simple project to execute from a mining perspective. We're obviously not building a processing plant or all that complexities.
We don't see that as a huge drain on, I guess, talent or capability. Obviously Sulphur Springs is, we're de-risking it with the development at the moment. Obviously, we've got GR Engineering there locked and loaded to push the button and start constructing that mid-year, hopefully, subject to FID.
How much cover do you want on the DSO? Are you looking for floor pricing or what are you thinking about that?
Yeah, look, a lot of the proposals have actually had floor pricing in it, and the ability to hedge as well. That's quite. I think Ben, we can probably even hedge three or six months out with product on pricing. There's real flexibility in that market. It's definitely open. Look, we don't know how long it will open for, but we're getting very good indications of how buoyant the market is. I think like the first shipment basically pays off the whole bloody CapEx of the project. It's pretty extraordinary. The C3 pricing that we're getting offered, it's very attractive for miners, let's just put it that way.
Okay. Just one on mining services there. Revenue was obviously lower ex the internal stuff. That was, I presume, just a mix of scoping versus development at Bellevue. When does Waihi start reporting revenue?
Yeah. Look, yeah, exactly right on the mining services, but we expect that to pick back up at Bellevue. Waihi will come in this quarter, mate. We only just mobilized effectively this month. We'll be lodging, obviously, the first sort of mobilization invoices this quarter. We'll start the first cut in the box cut. It will be on the back end of this month. Look, there was a bit of weather that went through New Zealand. I didn't know a cyclone could go that far south of the Southern Hemisphere. Auckland and the North Island did get hit a couple of weeks ago by a cyclone. The box cut there got delayed a couple of weeks. Otherwise, we would have taken our first cut by now.
As I said, all the equipment is there, people are there and we're raring to get into it and start this five-year development contract.
Brilliant. Thanks, chaps.
Thank you. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one on your phone. We'll pause for a moment to allow any last questions to come through. At this time, we're showing no further questions. I'll hand the conference back to Bill for closing remarks.
Hopefully. Sorry guys, I just broke up then. Thank you everyone for joining DEVELOP's call today. As I said at the start, we're fast closing the first quarter of this business out. Take time to read the quarterly. There is a lot of activity. We're basically building three mines in three years. This business is looking radically different month by month, and we're very excited about bringing the next two mines on and hopefully winning some more mining services. We've got four to six weeks left in the first quarter, but we're super excited about the second quarter of what our business looks like. Thanks for joining us.