Good morning to the listeners, and a very good morning to the people listening from Western Australia. As we foreshadowed at our quarterly, we have been working to optimize our business to adapt to the low-price environment that we're now faced with. I think it's important that we provide some context first. When we made the decision to build Kathleen Valley, we were looking into a very, very strong market, and the strategy for the company was to grow rapidly to 3 million tons and then shortly thereafter to 4 million tons. The price environment at that time afforded us the ability to invest upfront capital in order to move rapidly and accelerate our growth plans. The environment has changed, and as a result, that upfront capital that we needed to spend, we could not sustain at these prices.
The business has had to adapt, and we've done that in an agile way. It starts with the mine plan, but we've also looked at an end-to-end optimization of the business, which we're hoping to articulate today to investors and listeners. If I start with the first slide, adapting quickly to a low-price environment, the key aspects of today's discussion will focus around these four pillars. Clearly, the foundation stone is the revised mine plan. We're now delivering a 2.8 million ton production rate from the end of FY27. In order to achieve that, we've reduced, over that timeframe of nearly six years, 38,000 meters of development in order to deliver what we need to deliver.
Sorry, our operating costs for that period of H2 of this year, we're providing guidance of AUD 775-AUD 855 per dry metric ton of 6% concentrate. And I want to stress that this is based on 6%, not 5.2% or 4.5%. This has been normalized for 6%. And this achievement has been done through this cash and business optimization that we've done, but the focus has been on cash. We've gone through our total capital and cost structures, and we've pulled out up to AUD 100 million of savings from this optimization program. But equally as important, we've preserved future optionality, which we will talk about. Should the market change, should conditions improve, we can pivot and move back into our expansion strategies. Next slide, please.
In getting to today, again, I'd like to take the listeners back because it's important that we articulate where we've come from. All along the way, we've delivered on our commitments. From when we started in October 2022, when we started doing our clearing, we've progressively met all our milestones, and we've delivered on schedule. There's a list of our accomplishments here, but the Tjiwarl Native Title Agreement in November 2021, securing Tier 1 offtake partners in Tesla, LG, and Ford. I won't go through them, but we were the first to arrange the customer-led finance to build Kathleen Valley through the Ford debt facility. Over 1,000 jobs to build Kathleen Valley, plus all the other multiplier effects we've had on local businesses in this area, given the backdrop of other mines in the area closing during this period.
We're very proud of what we've been able to deliver, and we're not putting out a refresh DFS that's been done three times before or telling the market we've just drilled another 50,000 meters in the same ore body. We've made genuine progress. As the last point says, doing what we say we will do. Next slide, please. I'll now hand over to our Chief Operating Officer, Adam Smits, who will go through October's performance. We did our quarterly last week, and we gave you the performance up to the end of September, but we want to give the market an update.
Okay, thanks, Tony. As we talk through at the quarterly, we've had a very strong start to the plant ramp-up. October was no different. 91% availability in the month of October, over 200,000 tons milled and 25,000 tons of concentrate produced at an average grade of 5.4% lithium and very low iron. A key part of what we've been able to achieve is linked to that availability, which was linked to the design and the work we did with Lycopodium and others in the design phase, and that's really, really starting to show through now. To date, we've shipped over 50,000 tons via Geraldton, and we have another 50,000 tons expected to be shipped this year. So that's just around 100,000 tons of concentrate that we're putting out the door before Christmas. We've really, really pushed hard with the plant.
We continue to push hard with the plant. The plant has so much capacity to continue to improve. Float recovery has progressively increased, and float recovery equals overall plant recovery. So for the month of October, the average recovery in the float circuit was 68%. The last week was 74%, and it peaked at 81%. Those are sort of numbers that much more mature companies than ours are putting out now after many years of operation. We're doing it after three or four months of operation. We've already started some minor debottlenecking work, and that's, I guess, a differentiator, or at least we see it as a differentiator for us. Yes, we've built an amazing plant, but we still see little tweaks and little room, little areas for improvement.
We had our first shutdown last week, which went extremely well, the first reline of the SAG mill, and we've already installed some upgraded components that were identified during commissioning. So that shows how quickly we're adapting to change and how quickly we're pushing to make this thing go even better than it is already.
I think the last point that I will add on that is that as we get more and more data, we will use that data to give us information, and from that information, we'll get knowledge, and ultimately, we will get performance. So Adam's team is now collecting data that's well-structured, and we're putting the latest tools and advances in technology to play so that we can get even better. I'll move to the next slide, please, and I want to talk about business optimization. I mean, we don't do an exercise like this by randomly cutting into issues and hoping for the best. This whole program, and I thank the market for being patient, but we had to be patient because it had to be done systematically and with a degree of rigor and thoroughness so that we can stand by it and support it in the market.
There are four key value drivers. There's the mine plan, which we'll talk about in a minute. I mean, the focus of the mine plan was twofold. Firstly, we wanted to prioritize the highest margin ore. We want to maximize the tons per vertical meter, and we wanted to go where the most efficient capital development led us to. It's important that an underground mining operation affords us this flexibility. We can go and target the areas, whereas in open pit, you have to start at the top and work your way down. There are no shortcuts. But equally important, the changes we wanted to make had to preserve mine life and resource extraction efficiency. Productivity is the next driver. As we mentioned in our quarterly, we're getting over 300 meters per jumbo per month, and that is continuing.
We've got dual declines. We don't have one decline, and we've got very short hauling cycles. Adam's already talked about the fourth-generation processing plant and the high-quality wear materials, and looking at our shutdown and the time between shutdowns, how our wear materials are going. We've got three months of data, and we're starting to get a feel for how the plant is performing and wearing. But that's more work to be done. There's debottlenecking that we're doing all the time, which Adam and his team and also our advisors and engineers like Coppetti are assisting in. Reducing the input costs. A lot of our commercial arrangements were finalized during hot market conditions. Now that we're in and running, we can look at our demand for certain consumables. Is there an opportunity to reduce?
Do we need to buy OEM materials, or can we go for a different brand that is cheaper? And then there's the lower-cost sourcing. Those four points are stock-standard approaches to reviewing your procurement spend. And then finally, I'll turn to Jon about this later, but there's optimizing how you allocate capital and being very, very disciplined around focusing on spending sustaining capital where there's a safety issue. That's first and foremost, but then the essential activities that maintain ongoing operations. If it's not needed now, let's defer. And just to give you an example of the sort of dollars we're talking about, there's up to AUD 100 million, but a subset of that is the AUD 9.5 million we saved by deferring ore sorting and replacing the higher-cost bore fields with lower-cost commercial solutions.
Next slide, please. So I'll now turn over to Adam that will go through the mine plan changes in detail.
Thanks, Tony. I think, as we've mentioned both Tony and I already today, that the key driver for the mine plan revision, and it was an enormous amount of work by Greg and his team to, I guess, optimize the mine plan, a key driver was making or chasing high-margin tons. Now, what are high-margin tons? In our case, high-margin tons are the ones with the lowest development, the best grade, and bulk, bulk tons, high tons per vertical meter. So in the upper areas of our ore body, the stopes are typically between 5,000 and maybe 15,000 tons in terms of on a stope basis. In the lower areas, they're 20,000 to 80,000 tons. So you can see that diving down, as we're proposing to do now, into the thicker, sweeter areas of the ore body earlier, gives us much, much, much higher-margin tons.
We've also adopted a much quicker mining sequence in the upper areas of Mount Mann. So you can see the little grey slots in between the pink bars in the picture to the bottom right corner. That means that the stope turnover is faster and the mining sequence is faster. We've also separated the upper and lower portions of the ore body with a sill pillar so we can mine two areas at once, and we've dived down into that central zone, which we always plan to do and go after it early. What you're seeing in that picture there is five and a half years of mining. There is another five-plus years already scheduled below that and another three or four years below that that hasn't been scheduled, although the stopes have been defined.
So a key other, I guess, part of this process is we're not killing or sterilizing any part of the ore body. This is the ultimate flexibility of what we've got as an underground proposition versus our peers that are open pit, is that we can go down and get the best ore. We don't have to top down in terms of a mining sequence. So the mining sequence, just to reemphasize focus on high-margin tons, we've deferred the Northwest Flats area. There's still more work to do in Northwest. That's not to say it won't come back into the mining schedule. We've got some drilling plan there to better define that, but certainly we've gone after the Mount Mann area, which is far better defined, far thicker, and with much better grades.
We've lifted the average grades in the first five years from sort of 1.2% to north of 1.5% now, which makes a big difference when you're mining.
Thank you, Adam. The only other points that I would add on this picture is the area circled in that dashed line. That's the area that provides the future optionality for expansion. We've bypassed that area to go down to the higher-margin product. But if the market changes, we can quickly move into this area and mine it, which was the initial intent when we were going for volume and accelerated growth. So if we go to the next slide, which is the FY25 guidance, in our quarterly update last week, we mentioned that we will provide the market with as much transparency as we can. We have followed what we believe is best practice in terms of how the costs are reported. We have given the market our unit operating costs, but also our all-in sustaining costs.
And the definitions of what's in and out is included in there. So the All-in Sustaining Cost includes our royalties as well, and we've made assumptions around price and FX for those royalties. So we believe we have, for this H2 of the year, a very competitive cost structure that will see us moving into the future. Another point to note here is H1 of the financial year, we're in ramp-up, and we're also finishing a project and starting a ramp-up. There is a lot of noise in those numbers. There's a lot of accounting treatments that come in and out, which made those results very difficult to unpick. So we gave a far cleaner perspective in H2 for the market to understand.
Our full-year FY25 guidance for production is between 260,000-295,000 dry metric tons of SC6 concentrate. Can you go to the next slide, please, Jon? Josh? So we've given you guidance for FY25. We'd like to now give you some directional perspectives in the next few years. So we'll go through each one of these areas. But the key point here is the objective of the revised mine plan is to optimize the outcomes through the key drivers that I've previously outlined. It gives us that optionality and value through the market cycles. So it starts with the mine and mine life. So I'll just ask Adam just to go through these points.
As noted earlier, the key driver for the mine plan revision was high-margin tons. We've chased high-margin tons. We didn't want to sterilize or have any material impact on what we didn't touch, so we can always go back and take it later. That's a key driver for the mine schedule. We wanted to retain that optionality so we could go back and we could mine out of sequence, if you like. Again, another advantage of the underground mine. In terms of plant performance, obviously, the plant was designed for three to expand for four. We're targeting now 2.8 million tons to the end of financial year 2027 and up to 530,000 tons of concentrate, all within the realms of what the plant was designed for, so there's no change there.
In terms of grade, current grade about 1.2%, peaking at about 1.5% - 1.6% by the end of the sort of five-and-a-half-year period that we've laid out, all within the realms of what we have with basically no upgrades to the plant. All that's happening at the moment is minor tweaks to further optimize what we've already bought.
On the cost of production, we will provide FY26 guidance in seven months' time in the normal course of business once we give the market the results of our full year, but we also want to note that the FY26 will be impacted by the fact that we're moving from open pit to underground. In that transition period, it will impact our cost structure and also our concentrate production. The final point is, if we move over to the capital investment piece, I'll ask Jon to walk us through this.
Yeah, thank you, Tony. In relation to capital investment and more specifically our sustaining capital spend, we do expect that to trend lower across FY26 to FY30, and that's one of the key drivers there is that lower underground development spend that we've spoken about, that 38,000 meters. That's obviously a significant cost saving there. Looking at the second bullet point, in relation to our Kathleen Valley project spend, as we mentioned on the quarterly call, we expect that to come to an end very shortly. We're just dealing with the tail end of the cash outflow associated with that, but that will be completed very shortly, and probably a key point to note is there is no additional planned growth CapEx beyond FY25. All of our CapEx will be reported in our sustaining CapEx number. Having said that, I'll return back to Tony.
Yes. And just to help the market understand how we've categorized the various forms of capital, we have put a definition slide as an appendix to this presentation so that you can clearly see how we've apportioned the capital in the various categories. So if we go to the next slide, please. Just to wrap up then in summary, it starts with the high-quality asset, which we've got in Kathleen Valley. I mean, we can only do what we can do with such a great asset that's afforded us the ability to be flexible. We're well positioned on the cost curve. We've given you guidance for H2 of this financial year, and we believe that guidance is competitive against our peers and below the spot price. We've delivered this track record of delivery. I cannot stress this more.
Now, we've delivered a greenfields project in just 19 months. We've got what we believe is an industry-leading process plant. We've got both open pit and underground going, and we've built a hybrid power station solution with all the associated infrastructure with our partner, Zenith. Now, we will continue to do things in a rigorous and systematic way and deliver on our promises. Given what we've gone through, we believe we've got genuine IP in this area. Now, looking forward, there aren't projects on the drawing board or shovel-ready. There is going to be a gap for projects to come on for the foreseeable future. We've optimized all the value drivers. We've had early success in our plant performance as we continue to go to steady state, but we will look to debottleneck the plant to get further upside.
We're using every tool at our disposal in order to get that ramp-up as efficient and effective as we can. As I mentioned, we're using technology such as AI. We've revised our mine plan and designed it to target high-margin products, a high-margin ore, and reduce development and fixed costs. We've optimized the processing plant to deliver 2.8 million tons, but 530,000 tons of SC6 at an average from FY28 to FY30. The important point here to note is we can satisfy all our customer obligations with the current mine plan design. We've done up to AUD 100 million of savings to be captured. We've disciplined ongoing capital cost management to ensure that we continue to manage our unit operating costs and all-in sustaining costs to trend lower after FY26.
Finally, we're adjusting our supply volumes to meet the current market and maximize cash margins over volume. We are focused on cash. Finally, Liontown remains responsive and committed to doing what we say we will do. And as I've iterated already in this presentation, our optionality has been retained. We'll revisit what we need to do should the market conditions improve. And we will pivot and therefore change the mine plan accordingly, which will mean there will be different sets of costs and requirements as a result of that. We need to demonstrate that we're agile and willing to adapt. So that brings our presentation to an end, and I'm happy to open the floor to Q&A.
Thank you, Tony. If you have not yet submitted your text question or joined the live audio queue, please do so now. I will introduce each caller by name and ask you to go ahead. You'll then hear a beep indicating your microphone is live. Our first question today comes from Kate McCutcheon from Citi. Kate, please go ahead after the beep.
Hi, morning, Tony and Adam. Just help me think about the mine plan. So your underground reserves are running at 1.3%. You've noted the new mine plan prioritizes grades above 1.2%, but you haven't given us a grade profile for that profile on slide nine. So what does that mine grade look like then to deliver you 1.5% as a process grade by FY30? If you can sort of talk through that profile, that would be great.
Yeah. So I think if I'm understanding your question correctly, the first couple of years are between 1.2% and 1.3%. Year three is 1.3% - 1.4%. Year four, 1.4% - 1.5%, and the next two years about 1.55% in broad terms.
Okay.
At a run rate.
That's just where it sits laterally. That's just where it sits laterally in the mine. That's just where it sits spatially in the mine.
Correct. Correct.
Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. We're just going to that area, and as it presents itself, we're mining it through.
Exactly. Some of those stopes are higher and some of those are lower, but that's the average grade for the year.
Got it. And then you've essentially given us an updated life of mine plan to 2030, but you haven't given us expected operating costs today past the next six months. There's been a lot that's changed since you last disclosed life of mine costs. How do we think about that profile? Your comments indicate FY26 will be higher versus FY25, and then it trends down to FY30.
Yeah. That's the guidance we've provided. I think there's a couple of points to make here, Kate. We're only three months into production, and we need to we've provided in the market what I believe is a first around providing guidance while we're still in ramp-up. The second thing is the focus that we've done on this work is sorry, we lost audio there. I'm not sure, Kate, how much you heard of my response to your question. Can you come back?
Sorry, Tony. I heard zero response.
Okay. Okay. It was strategically timed, Kate. So there's a couple of points that I'd like to make again. Firstly, we've provided guidance for H2 of this financial year. And from what we can see and the benchmarking we've seen is it's not done often where a company provides guidance while they're ramping up. So we felt that we're on a first there by providing you at least guidance for H2 of this financial year. The second bit is we've provided a lot of focus on the fact that this is for the next five to six years, the work that we've done. The team has not finished the life of mine optimization. We prioritized the first five and a half years in order to get a sense as to where the costs could go.
And in parallel, but at a slower cadence, we also started the life of mine optimization, which will include how we bring in Northwest Flats, because we're doing some drilling in that area to see whether there is another way of coming into that ore body through the open pit, for example. So because we haven't finished the life of mine, it was hard to give you a life of mine cost structure.
Okay. And so will there be an update when that work is done, Tony?
We'll see.
Our next question today comes from Adam Baker from Macquarie. Adam, please go ahead after the beep.
Hi, Tony, and thanks for providing the guidance color after you've got the real-time operating data. Just wondering on the cost, given that they're given on an SC6 basis, should we use this as a read-in to what the quality of concentrate you're aiming to produce? And if not, should we expect these costs to be normalized to an SC 5.2% or 5.3% basis?
So, Adam, as we've mentioned before, we'll go after concentrate grade. It's just that we didn't feel confident, given that we're only three and a bit months into the ramp-up, to adequately quantify the benefit of reducing the concentrate grade. So we're going to give ourselves a little more time for us to be able to understand the impact that it has on flotation, because we're not going to do this if we don't get a material increase in recovery. All right? So we will keep that in reserve and come to the market at a later date around the benefits of lowering the concentrate grade. All right? So until that happens, all our costs are based on 6%.
So if we do go for a lower concentrate grade and produce more tons, then there will be a volume benefit to those unit costs. So that's an upside.
Got it. And I see that you mentioned no more growth CapEx beyond FY25, but I see at the back of the report there's a mention of a second tailings facility. Could you just talk me through that? Is it mainly just building like increasing the capacity of the current tailings facility, or is there a requirement for a second facility?
Yeah. I think I can answer that, Adam. It's just normal business, I think. We've got the second cell to complete, which is, I think, all up about AUD 14 million, but it's factored in the operating costs, and there's an annual lift of each cell at about AUD 3.5 million-AUD 4 million.
Yeah. Just to unpick that, the lifts in the existing cell are part of our sustaining capital, and the construction of the outer walls for the second tailings cell is the capital that Adam just referred to.
Our next question comes from Glyn Lawcock from Barrenjoey. Glyn, please go ahead after the beep.
Hi, Tony. Good morning.
Morning .
We haven't had a lot of time to digest all this, but I just want to try and understand the cash flow. Your guidance for H2, if I look at it, probably suggests you're going to burn about AUD 50 million. Then if I think about this quarter, we're in, given you've got AUD 65 million of CapEx as well you've disclosed in the footnotes, and it's probably going to be an even higher you'll burn more than you will from an operating cash flow perspective. So it looks like you're going to burn through AUD 150 million -AUD 200 million between now and the end of the financial year, and you've got AUD 263 million on the balance sheet. I mean, how comfortable are you with the balance sheet given that outlook if current prices hold?
A couple of things, Glyn. I think you're right. We've given guidance that let's take the AUD 263 million that we outlined at the end of the September quarter. We've got about AUD 65 million of further tail-in to the CapEx, which we've disclosed today. The operating costs, I think you can use what we've given you as guidance for FY25 H2 as a good driver of what they're likely to be for the next few months. And then on the other flip side, we've got revenue coming in. So for these first six months, we're going to have about 100,000 tons of spodumene sales, over 100,000 tons of spodumene sales. So I think from the modeling we've done, and we've done modeling at various price scenarios, we're good.
Okay. But I mean, basically, spot pricing against your all-in sustaining costs, I mean, spot prices are at the very bottom end of your all-in sustaining costs, but that excludes your growth capital you're spending in H2. So you will burn cash in H2, but when do you expect to be cash flow positive then on an all-in basis?
That depends on your price outlook. As I said, we've done a series of scenarios, both consensus, WoodMac, our own price forecast. We've extended today's spot price for a period of time. We've looked at this.
Our next question is a written question from Matt Chalmers from Bank of America Securities. Matt says, "Good morning, Tony. With the revised mine plan focusing on higher margin ore for the next few years, would you be able to provide some thoughts on the impact to recoveries over the same period and when you believe Kathleen Valley will reach its targeted 78% recoveries?
I'll answer that question with myself, and then I'll refer to Adam. But just on the 78%, the 78% was a life of mine average that we published on the DFS, and we're confident we'll get that, but it's very contingent on grade. So we've given you that average because the underground gives us where the better grade is. But in the short term, maybe I'll flip over to Adam.
Yeah. So in the sort of next 12 to 18 months, we're targeting to hit, I guess, the industry norm, which is around about the 65% recovery mark. We're already cracking 60s% now in the plant. Overall recoveries, this is not float recoveries. I think it's about 2027 that we've forecast recoveries in the mid-70s%. So we're not being super aggressive here saying we're going to do it in one week. As Tony said, this is a plant that's still ramping up. The fact that we are in the 60s% spasmodically already relative to our peers who've been five, six years to get there, I think is a really positive note. But it's very much grade-driven. We've seen already in the first three months how much the plant likes grade and how much that adds to recovery.
It's quite spectacular, actually, when you get the difference between 1.2%-1.4% feedstock going through, you jump 10% or 15% recovery almost instantaneously. So yeah, I think realistically, 65% is a very real recovery through to the end of next year, and then beyond that in the 70s% is the current plan.
We have another written question from Matt Chalmers. Second question, what is the timeline you are targeting to achieve the AUD 100 million in cost savings?
Broadly, most of that will be in this financial year.
Thank you. Our next question, we've got Hugo Nicolaci from Goldman Sachs on the line. He's also got a written question through, but we'll go to you on the line first, Hugo. Go ahead after the beep. Thanks.
Hi, Tony. Adam, thanks for the call. Just apologies if this was coming before and missed it with the line, but just want to get a better sense of where the components of that unit cost guidance you've given for H2 sit today versus that split you gave us last October, particularly around any color you can give on where you're seeing underground mining costs versus that $73 a ton from 12 months ago.
Thank you. Go for that, Adam.
Oh, look, I think it really varies on where we are in the ore body, Hugo, but somewhere between AUD 80 and AUD 100 is probably a pretty real number, probably closer to the AUD 100 mark initially.
But just to be clear on that number, that is all inclusive.
Correct.
Right?
It's not just a raw mining cost.
Yeah, so if I want to do a like for like to the number we provided in October last year, it's probably about AUD 80.
All right. And then just any sort of color around where you're seeing processing and transport and admin and all the moving pieces?
Yeah. So processing, I think, is marginally higher than we. I'm trying to remember the numbers off the top of my head.
From October.
From October, but the logistics is exactly the same.
Thank you. That is the last question for today, and that does conclude today's call. Thank you for your time and have a great day. Please reach out to the Liontown team if you have any follow-up questions.