King statements, because I will be making a few. Okay, Kingsgate today. Who are we? What are we? We're an Australian-listed gold producer. You can see our key metrics there on the left-hand side. Market cap of around $500 million U.S. Currently trading around $3 Australian per share. We've got approximately 257 million shares on issue. I want you to remember that point because I'll come back to it later in terms of why it's part of our value proposition. Currently got around $72 million U.S. in cash, bullion and dore. Around $34 million U.S. in total borrowings. Share register, particularly over the past decade, has been largely sort of retail, sophisticated retail.
Pleasing to say over the last 12 months, especially, we've picked up some institutions, particularly out of Germany and Switzerland, which have always been strong supporters of ours, and some here out of the North Americas, which has been really pleasing as well. Just a little brag chart there at the bottom because we've had a really, really good 12 months. In fact, if you had bought us this time last year, you'd be 140% better off. We are covered by Canaccord. I want to shout out to them. They actually put out an updated coverage note on us overnight. They said our new price target of $4.95 AUD. Very happy about that. Two key assets we have. We have the Chatree Gold Mine, which is a producing gold asset in central Thailand.
We have the highly prospective Nueva Esperanza Silver Gold Project, which is located in the Maricunga Belt of the Atacama region of Chile. Let's get into the projects. We'll start with Chatree first. I just need to do a quick preface to this slide to say that in 2016, Kingsgate had an issue with the Thai government where they didn't renew a key license we needed. Pleased to say we worked through an international legal process to have that license restored to us. It took a little bit longer than we thought. From 2022, we've been putting the whole show back together. We've made significant progress since then. Chatree itself, located 280 kilometers north of Bangkok. It's a large open pit, low-grade epithermal deposit. We've got about 1.24 million ounces of gold in reserve.
That gives us about a nine to ten-year life of mine running at around a run rate of about 100,000 ounces a year. That's very exciting for us. As I say, when Kingsgate operated it previously, it is a world-class deposit. We produce close to two million ounces of gold, 10 million ounces of silver. Since 2022, we've been putting it all back together. As part of that, we bought 41 new pieces of Caterpillar equipment. We produced 75,000 ounces of gold last year, 625,000 ounces of silver. That was really just a bit of a watershed year for us. We've only really been mining properly for about 12 months. In fact, the equipment came through in September. We've been testing it out. We've got two large processing plants that sit side by side. Because we are a low-grade deposit, we have significant capacity.
They're fairly standard flow sheet, just carbon and leach. The nameplate capacity of those two plants is five million tons. Pleased to say we've been running those at sort of 5.7, touched 5.9. I think we might have touched six there at one point. We're 14% above nameplate capacity currently. Very excited about that. As part of us coming back as well, Thailand gave us $100 million Board of Investment incentives. Most of that is a tax holiday. It does apply to withholding tax exemptions if we repatriate money. It also applies to duty exemptions when we buy equipment. That's very good. One of the things we're most proud of is we have a really highly educated local Thai workforce there as well. I'll say a little bit more about that later in the presentation. This is just a quick snapshot of 2025.
As I say, it was a sort of rebirth, restart year for us. 75,000 ounces of gold, 625,000 ounces of silver. A couple of the key highlights, operating highlights. We did have one gold pool there that was more than 2,700 ounces for the week. Pleased to say since then, we've bettered that record. I think we've gone over 3,200 since then. Look, average all-in sustaining cost was a little bit lumpy, obviously, because we were restarting. The average for the year ended up around $1,367, which isn't too bad. I guess the key uplift off that was an incredible boost in our ASIC margin from the first quarter to the last quarter, a 275% improvement from around $330 to $1,240 U.S. dollars ASIC margin. We're very excited about that. That's, again, a focus on cost efficiencies as we're ramping up. We're getting more ounces and so forth.
The other thing that we're really focusing on is a strong cash build. We're able to increase our cash by 258% through the year, ended at $55 million. Just for maybe the North Americans who may not know, the year-end for Australia is 30 June. All of these metrics are up to 30 June. That was our year that was. What's the year coming look like? I want to preface this slide by saying we're being a little bit conservative here. Chatree's been known to be a plus 100,000 ounce asset. We'll certainly get it back to that. We just want to be a little bit more careful this year. We're mining in one central open pit, what we call the A pit. Not very creative, I know. On the western side of that, we've got a little bit of a cutback to do.
Our strip ratio will go up a little bit. We put out conservative guidance, 85,000 to 95,000 ounces gold. That's about 93,000 to 103,000 ounces gold equivalent. As I say, we produce a lot of silver. Silver as a byproduct credit at $41 is a pretty good problem to have. That's what we're looking at. We think we can achieve that. Again, as part of that going forward, the two main focuses will be really to reduce our operating costs and to make sure that we set the mine up for future success. In fact, a couple of our learned shareholders that we've been talking to have said, be smart, not greedy. One of my colleagues said, it's not ounces for ounces' sake. Obviously, we're in a record gold market. We want to make sure that we can survive and we can operate in any gold market going forward.
That's the strategy behind that. This is our organic growth pathway to support that. One of the great things about Chatree is that we have first and only mover advantage because we're the only gold mining company in Thailand. In fact, we're in the Loei Fold Belt. I'll talk a little bit more about that on the next slide, which is a really underdeveloped belt. We've been able to peg certainly some of the most interesting and highly prospective parts of that. Currently, we have 1,200 square kilometers of exploration ground, 17 active tenements. If you can have a look at the diagram on the right, you can see the Chatree mining complex is that sort of misshapen brown spot in the top left section of that thing. I just want you to look at, there's a pink square there called the Southeastern Complex. That's actually really exciting.
We know that's an extension of the existing Chatree deposit. We've been working really hard on that this year to prove that up. Let me just show you a few highlights from the Southeast Complex. This is it. I know the diagram on the right, that's an aerial schematic of our drill holes, and that looks a bit like a pin cushion. We've spent a lot of effort and resources on exploring that this year. In fact, our exploration budget for FY2025 was around $5.5 million US, probably a little bit more than that. We did over 30,000 meters of reverse circulation drilling, 4,000 meters of diamond drilling because we wanted to get underneath, see what the structural system looked like. There's a couple of intersections there, and you can see X marks the spot on the right-hand side.
You can see at the bottom there, we had 8 meters at 20 grams. We had 15 meters at 5 grams, which is really incredible for this asset. In the very early days of Chatree, when we were mining some of the original pits, we know that there was some supergene halo enriched ore there. We think the same for this deposit. The other really pleasing thing about this deposit, it's actually only 2 kilometers from our processing plant. It's actually closer than the A pit that we're mining now. We've only drilled about a third of it. We'll continue working on this area. We're looking to post a maiden resource on it later this year as well.
We're also applying for a mining lease at the same time because where we are currently in the A pit, we could mine 4 or 5 years without having to change our mining schedule. If we can vend this in sooner, then we get into some of these higher grades. It really is a game changer for Chatree. We're super excited about that. Stay tuned. You'll see more on this prospect going forward. Obviously, just a quick one on this. Without a social license to operate, there is no Chatree. There is no Southeast Complex, any of those sorts of things. Kingsgate's been really big on ESG. Because we've been around for a long time, Chatree was founded back in the early 1990s. We've had a really strong community relations program.
I won't go through all of the things that we do there, but as I mentioned earlier, we've got a really highly educated local workforce. Since I was here last, we've added another 5%. We've got 85% of the workforce is local of the 700 people that we've got at Chatree. We've visited more than 3,300 households in the last financial year. Now, we have more than 5,500 households within 10 kilometers of the mine. We have, over the years, I'm told, been to all of them. We maintain really strong relationships with them. We went to more than 100 community meetings last year. Why that's important, it's not just about the value of the mine and maintaining engagement. We need the community to come with us and vote for us on licenses and permits. We have a really strong relationship. We do that very well. We give health checks.
We recycle waste. We've planted more than 17,000 trees across 12 communities. We run a whole range of other microeconomic projects. We've built water filtration. We've built schools. We've helped with hospital expansions and all of that. That's really, really important to us. Without that, there is no Chatree. This slide's really a picture tells a thousand words. This is some of our team out and about. We have a dedicated team of about 40 people working around the clock. This is some community engagement, government engagement, local engagement at all different levels. Just a quick, quick brag slide there. Okay, just jumping across, we have another asset as well. This is the development project in Nueva Esperanza Silver Gold Project. I'll put my hand up and be the first to say this hasn't gone as quickly as we want.
One of the things we found with it, we've been doing a lot of work to bring it back into shape. When we had our little hiccup in Thailand, we had to pause works on this as well. One of the things we found is that some of the original drilling data was a little bit old. It needed to be reconstituted. It needed to be run through modern techniques. That's taking us a little bit longer. We still think it's an incredible asset, particularly with silver at $40 an ounce. We have been doing other things on it throughout the year. We're actually adopting the layer cake approach. We've been doing some geotechnical work. We've been doing some sampling at some highly prospective target areas. We're looking to do a resource update on this later in the year as well.
We're also putting significant work into making sure that the water, we have permanent water bores there that we lease from Anglo, making sure we keep those in good order. We make no secret of it. We really like this. We think it's got high value. We want to give Kingsgate shareholders exposure to this value. If that looks like a listing for this as a separate silver play out of North America, we're advanced in some discussions on that, joint venture or sale. We've got some ideas on what we can do to unlock the value for that. I just want to wrap up with, what's our value proposition? What makes us different to our ASX peers and certainly gold peers around? Why should you invest in us, for example? I think we've still got a lot of runway to go in our production ramp up.
As I say, last year was 75,000 ounces. This year, we're targeting 85,000 to 95,000 going forward. We'll be back over the 100,000 ounces. We can show that we can do that. We've had two consecutive quarters now of plus 20,000 ounce production. Without hopefully jinxing myself, we're looking at having a really strong September quarter this quarter going forward. As I say, there's not a lot of big capital spend coming up. We've got a whole lot of new capital Caterpillar equipment. We've got two beautiful big fully refurbished hungry plants that we want to feed. Financial strength is part of it as well. We were able to repay $12 million in debt last year. We're unhedged to the current gold and silver prices. I mentioned at the start, one of our value propositions is the fact that we have a tight capital structure.
For those who may not know, we've only been to the equity market once in a decade. We're not big equity people. In fact, if you look at our, particularly our ASX peers, many of those have two, three, four, five times the amount of shares on issue as us. What that allows us to do is to improve the value for our shareholders through things like share buybacks, which we started already this year. We've already done some this calendar year. The board's very motivated to get back to a dividend policy. Kingsgate paid a lot of dividends, more than $100 million when it was previously operating. That's something that we want to do going forward to reward our shareholders, particularly those that stayed with us and have been with us throughout the last sort of 10 or 15 years, of which there are quite a few.
Of course, this is all supported by our organic growth pathway. As I mentioned, huge exploration area. We've got our foot on all the best bits. We've got the highly prospective Southeastern Complex coming online, updating resources for that and the Chatree Complex itself this year. Of course, we've got a cracking silver asset in South America that we're looking to optimize for shareholder value as well. I just want to conclude by saying at $3 Australian with a price target of $4.95, we are a cracking buy. Our ticker code is ASX:KCN. Go and grab some today. Thank you.
Thanks, Jamie. Great presentation. Thank you. Would you like to take a question?
If there is a question.
Is there a question out here?
One of the slides had your cash cost or something like that, but it said pre-royalties. Could you say something about royalties to either the other vendors or the government or the tax rate?
Yes, look, the issue with the Thai royalties, Thailand does have one of the highest gold royalties in the world. It is a sliding-scale gold royalty, so it goes up with the gold price. That is something that we have under active negotiation with Thailand. About maybe 25% or 30% of our total all-in cost is the royalty. We are very conscious of that. What it actually motivates us to do is to really focus on margins on our operating costs, and that is what we are working on going forward.