Fenix Resources Limited (ASX:FEX)
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Apr 28, 2026, 4:11 PM AEST
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Noosa Mining Investor Conference

Jul 24, 2025

Moderator

Next up, we have Fenix Resources. Now, Fenix is operating in a very innovative and profitable, fully integrated mining, port, and logistics business in WA, covering every link of the supply chain from extraction to delivery. Here to tell us the good news about Fenix is the Chairman, Mr. John Welborn. Thanks, John.

John Welborn
Chairman, Fenix Resources

Thanks very much for the intro. I'm delighted to be back at Noosa. What a busy conference it is this year. The good news is Fenix Resources has had a fantastic year. The bad news is our share price is exactly the same as it was when I was here almost to the day, a year ago. Please hold me accountable. I'm looking forward to coming back next year, and I'm expecting a big change. Let me explain why in the next 15 minutes. I really love this photo. This is the Iron Ridge Iron Ore Mine. We published a feasibility study in 2019, which said we could mine 1.4 million tons a year from this.

It was a greenfields project, and we could do that by mining it, crushing, screening it, and then hauling it 500 km on public roads, and exporting it through the port of Geraldton, for $85 Australian FOB. I'm really pleased that we published a quarterly this morning, which had a couple of key numbers in it. We produced 760,000 tons in the June quarter. The combined C1 cash cost of that three quarters of a million tons was $59.50 Australian FOB Geraldton. I challenge any of the gold producers here to talk about their feasibility studies on their project five years ago and compare their current all-in sustaining cost to what they projected. We have delivered the project you can see on this screen, and we're operating at a fundamentally different cost structure across our mining business, our haulage business, and our port business.

In the distance at the top of this photograph, you can see the World Range. I'm going to talk a little bit about that in this presentation. That's our future. You can see the pit outline of the Iron Ridge Iron Ore Mine. We've just celebrated our six millionth ton from this project, which we commissioned in 2020. You can see very simple mining, crushing, and screening product stockpile there. One of our beautiful new haul super quad road trains is down the bottom of the picture, just setting out on its 500 km journey to Geraldton. We have three businesses at Fenix Resources. We have a mining business, which we started at Iron Ridge. We now also have commissioned the Shine Iron Ore Mine in December of last year, and we're on the cusp of our first production from our third iron ore mine, Beebyn W11.

We have a logistics and haulage business, the Fenix-Newhaul business, originally founded by Craig Mitchell, my fellow Executive Director of Fenix Resources, and that operates a state-of-the-art logistics business that handles all of our haulage requirements. We run a port business. We have invaluable, in my view, infrastructure at the port of Geraldton that consists of on-wharf storage facilities that can store more than 440,000 tons of product. We have a truck unloader and the inloading and outloading access, which we believe gives us the capacity to export more than 10 million tons a year of bulk commodities. The pathway from the feasibility I mentioned in 2019 to raising $15 million of capital in 2020, which is the last time we raised money from the market.

Since then, the achievements on this slide have enabled us to pay back $65 million in fully franked dividends, and we've invested around $200 million into the business. We've generated $1 billion in revenue. We've created 300 jobs in the Midwest, and we've only just got started. Let's talk about the Midwest in Western Australia. In the top right there, you can see the Pilbara, where the iron ore miners are basically tipping the world on its axis. The amount of material we're sending north into the Asian markets, almost 1 billion tons of seaborne iron ore. This part of the world in the Midwest, iron ore was discovered here 100 years ago, and almost all of it is still in the ground. Mount Gibson were the most successful miner in this part of the world. They produced 50 million tons, starting in around the early 2000s.

We've inherited all of their infrastructure, the facilities I mentioned at Geraldton Port, two rail sidings, and the Shine Iron Ore Mine. Iron Ridge, you can see there in the middle of the World Range. Beebyn -W11 is 20 km away. This is a wonderful area to operate. A lot of the gold miners you heard present earlier today know this region well. We're surrounded by a very productive mining industry. There are tons of projects in feasibility study land here. We're a logistics infrastructure company that look like an iron ore miner, and we see a huge future to expand. Let me show you what our current operations look like at Fenix. This is Iron Ridge. Really nice pit here. This is a three-to-one strip ratio. We're currently mining the highest grade ore body on mainland Australia.

It's a 65% in situ ore body, 30 to 40 meters wide, and very simple operations performed by MACA here. Very successful. It's consistently produced 1.4 million tons per annum every year. Simple digging haulage up to the ROM pad and very simple blending. We produce a 64% lump product and a 63% fines product. It's allowed us to get a premium to the index pricing. You can see our lump stockpile there. The real secret here is the loading we do onto our own haul trucks. These are purpose built. They're built by Bruce Rock Engineering in Western Australia. They're a unique combination, incredibly stable on the road. We've expanded that fleet significantly from the original 23 trucks running 1.4 million tons down these roads, you can see, to now 70 trucks to handle the iron ore from Iron Ridge and Shine and soon Beebyn -W11.

Here's our port facilities in Geraldton, our Nungalu training depot and service center for the Fenix-Newhaul trucks. We do all our own work there. We have one of its kind driver simulator. Here are the facilities at Geraldton Port. Enormous infrastructure that we've only just started to use, even at 4 million tons per annum. We've got a lot of excess capacity. We're shipping Panamax boats to a range of customers. A lot of our material goes to China, but we also service customers in other Asian economies on shorter shipping routes. It's an exciting business. We own and control all aspects of that operation. We've been targeting to achieve a run rate of 4 million tons per annum. If you're good at maths, you'll notice that the June quarter, 760,000 tons produced translates to a 3 million ton per annum run rate.

We started mining the Beebyn deposit at 1.5 million tons per annum in June. We completed the haul road connecting that mine to our network a couple of weeks ago. We've forecast that we'll make our first shipment from Beebyn -W11 next month in August. That will take us to 4.5 million tons per annum. In the June quarter we published this morning, we generated $25 million of operating cash flow during a quarter where the iron ore price was between $95 and $98 USD a ton. If you annualize that at 3 million tons per annum, we're producing $100 million of cash flow. We're about to be producing 4.5 million tons per annum, and we're seeing iron ore prices tick up. That's very exciting for a company that, as I mentioned, similar to last year, still has a market cap of $200 million.

The real secret to our business is, in fact, we are a logistics company. Fenix-Newhaul operates a state-of-the-art business. This is the A-team in bulk haulage. It's purpose designed, and it integrates with our mining business and our port services business. You can see the facilities we have at Geraldton Port here. To put the scale of Shed 5 in perspective, you can fit two rugby fields end-on-end inside Shed 5, and they're high enough that even the highest highball won't hit the roof. That shed can store a quarter of a million tons. We also have Shed 13 and Shed 4. They provide huge storage flexibility. We have the only side-tipping truck unloader at Geraldton Port.

We also own the infrastructure that connects those sheds to both the truck unloader and the rail dumper, and the outloading infrastructure that connects it to the Mid West Ports Authority berth loader on berth 5 that you can see there. That is an incredibly advantageous infrastructure position. We heard from Steve Fuster at BCI the importance in Western Australia of port access. Work backwards from ports. Billions of tons of iron ore and so many projects in Western Australia are constrained by their search for port access. We have, we own these port facilities at Geraldton Port. We're using them at the moment. We are expanding into their capacity. We're also providing third-party logistics for customers profitably. The number one prize for Fenix Resources is to maximize our own tons and continue to grow our cash flows through working backwards from our port business. We're very active in the community.

I mentioned that we've created 300 jobs in the Midwest region. We're the headline sponsor of the Fenix Buccaneers, so I'm pleased to announce we're in the NBL1 basketball finals. More importantly, we're continuing to grow our community focus in order to cater for the drivers that we're actively recruiting. We're currently building 50 dwellings in Geraldton. There's been a housing crisis there that people have been talking about for years and years and years. Fenix Resources, we're getting ahead and solving it by actually building high-quality community housing in order to put our workforce into the community so that they can live and work in a non-FIFO environment, which is what the majority of our workforce enjoy. Three big catalysts coming for Fenix Resources. Increasing production to 4 million tons per annum. Expect that announcement in the coming weeks as we ship our first shipment from Beebyn -W11.

We've been targeting that achievement since we announced the right to mine with Sinosteel Midwest Corporation, and it's a key internal target. We're very confident we can maintain that production and grow it. I think we've demonstrated that we can generate strong EBITDA and strong profits since we got Iron Ridge in production in 2020. FY 2021, FY 2022, FY 2023, we've done that on 1.4 million tons per annum of production. We're tripling that production this year. Our share price hasn't moved, but our cash flow is going to demand a re-rate on the back of that. It's a number one catalyst. The team has executed that project brilliantly. Second catalyst I'm intending to find here is a bit of a euphemism, expanding ore reserves. We don't have any drill rigs spinning. We don't have any geologists out hunting for new ore bodies. We've got three mines with pretty limited mine lifes.

We've got a port that can do 10 million tons a year. We've got a scalable haulage business. Our job is to unlock the value of exploration money that has already been spent. Iron ore was discovered in the Midwest more than 100 years ago. Billions of dollars have been spent defining minable resources. Our job is to unlock them. We've done that at Iron Ridge. We've done that at Shine. We've demonstrated to our main partner, Sinosteel, that we can do that at Beebyn -W11. Stay tuned for what's next. Staying on the public record, if you go back and look at our October 2023 announcement, which is when we secured the right to mine 10 million tons from Sinosteel Midwest Corporation, there's some really interesting information publicly disclosed in that announcement.

Sinosteel completed a feasibility study for their World Range project that identified they could mine 15 million tons per annum for more than 10 years. They have 300 million tons of resources in the World Range. We have a right to mine 10 million tons from W11, which is a 20 million ton ore body. In that agreement, it says that the parties will collaborate on future opportunities. There is an obligation that where Fenix can show that we can economically exploit further resources, Sinosteel agreed to facilitate the expansion of that agreement. We are on the cusp of demonstrating to them that we've done exactly what we set out to do. We can efficiently monetize their vast investment in the hundreds of millions of tons that you saw in the hills on that very first photo. This second catalyst, stay tuned. We are focused on expanding our ore reserves.

That will allow us to generate significantly larger cash flows than people have been expecting from Fenix. In case you're not joining the dots, sometimes a picture can tell the story a little bit clearer. On this picture, you can see the Iron Ridge mine that you saw on the very first photo. It's in the middle in red. It had a reserve of 8.3 million tons at 64.8% iron ore. That's what we're currently mining. We've mined 6 million tons of that reserve, and we've got a couple of years left. The mine we're just starting, we have a 10 million ton right to mine, is on the right-hand side. That's the Beebyn W11 deposit. The other dots are W1 to W50. They are the resources within 50 km in the World Range. Most of those are owned by our main partner, Sinosteel Midwest Corporation.

Stay tuned for that second catalyst. We're a $200 million market cap company. We're producing cash. We've got a fantastic team. I'm here at the booth. I'd love to talk to you about Fenix Resources and what we're doing.

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