Thank you. It's great to be here and to provide an update or an introduction to Meeka Metals, as the case may be. It's been an incredibly busy period for us this last 12 months. Late last year, we put out a Definitive Feasibility Study that outlined how we wanted to develop our Murchison Gold Project, the production profile that this project would deliver for us, the cash flow that it would deliver for us, and, importantly, the funding required to deliver that development. The last 12 months, we've now executed on that plan. We started work on upgrading and upscaling the processing plant in October of last year, so about nine months ago. We started open pit mining in February of this year, so about six months ago, and then underground mining. We've just commenced underground mining at our first underground mine this month. Incredibly busy period.
Importantly, all of that activity, we poured first gold. The plant was commissioned in June, construction through October through June, commissioned in June, started processing all mid-June, poured first gold 1st of July . Very important. To date, things are going incredibly well and in line with plans. Very positive on that front. From a balance sheet perspective, this development was funded with equity, so we've got a relatively tidy balance sheet, no debt, and with that, no hedging. We've got full exposure to the upside in the gold price and, importantly, a strong cash position. At the end of June, finished the June quarter with $56 million cash in the bank. We've now got a gold mine that's fully developed, producing, ramping up, production's ramping up, strong cash flow, clean balance sheet, and full exposure to the gold price.
In terms of the cap structure, we closed yesterday at $0.15, gives us a market cap of in the order of $440 million. As I said, $56 million cash in the bank, so an enterprise value of around $380 million, which is modest when you look at it through the lens of our production profile. What you see on the top right-hand side of the slide there is our annualized production. Modest first 12 months of production, 45,000 ounces- 50,000 ounces, ramping up. The dark blue bars there represent open pit production. The lighter blue bars being underground production. We're mill constrained. We want to get underground where the grade is a little better as fast as possible. Consciously, we're also conscious that underground mining is more complex. Open pit mining is relatively straightforward.
It's easy to start, to ramp up, and from our perspective, that de-risked the development of the project. There was a conscious decision early on to start with open pit mining and then transition to the better grade as we've de-risked that commissioning and startup process. What we're also doing is we're pulling forward. I said we've started underground mining. We've pulled forward our first underground into year one. That's not captured on that slide there, but we'll start to have underground ore coming through next month. There's some upside to that production profile, with consistent growth, 45,000 ounces- 50,000 ounces in year one, FY2026, ramping up towards 75,000 ounces- 80,000 ounces. Average over the first seven years is about 65,000 ounces. If you look at the cash flow that that delivers, really strong pre-tax free cash flow, this is at a much lower gold price environment.
$3,500 an ounce gold price assumption. If you dial in spot price, which is around $5,100 an ounce, you can affect, or the easy way to look at it is just double the size of those bars or double those numbers. Really strong annualized cash flow, and that cash flow improves as the production profile improves. In terms of the project, we're located 50 kilometers north of Meekatharra, town of Meekatharra there, 50 km north, a modest resource, 1.2 million ounce resource base, but very high grade relative. 3 g per ton. With that, a modest starting reserve, 400,000 ounces, and that's likely to grow as we do further drilling and further work over the coming years. It's slightly over 3 g . Importantly, all of the infrastructure that we need to operate this project is established. It's built, it's commissioned.
The processing plant, we finished that, commissioned that in June, poured first gold in on the 1st of July. All of our support infrastructure, the accommodation village, administration, stores, workshop, all of those bits of infrastructure have been constructed, are in use, they're being commissioned in use, and now it's a process of ramping up production, ramping up gold production, ramping up the mill throughput. The processing plant itself, we started work, as I said, in October of last year. Less than nine months of work to get this back online. We increased the size of the ball mill, the gravity circuit, the gold room, the secondary crusher, and that should get us up to that 600,000 tons per annum run rate.
Importantly, our focus for the coming 12 months is, in the first instance, ramp up the throughput through the plant, get it to that nameplate 600,000 tons per annum throughput, then work on expansion. How do we get this plant from 600,000 tons per annum up to 1 million tons per annum? We think we've got a relatively straightforward pathway to do that. This next 12 months, we'll define that. We'll understand, design that, outline how that expansion's going to happen, the cost to do it, and importantly, what ore is going to fit into that expanded processing plant. We feel we'll be in a position to outline that to the market mid-next year, so the end of this financial year.
In terms of the detailed site layout, the processing infrastructure, accommodation village, all of the support infrastructure up in the northwest, our first underground mine at Andy Well, and then a private haul road down to our open pit mining area down in the southeast. We started mining down here in February of this year. That's ramping up steadily. We're in ore. We've got three pits online now and hauling that ore up to the processing plant. We've just started mining at Andy Well, which is our first underground. Second underground, we're looking to start next year at Turnbury once the initial pits are finished. Early next year, finish the starter pits, get underground, and we'll be mining concurrently open pit and underground. This long section is a cutaway of that open pit mining area.
North on the right, north to south, the five initial open pits, as well as the underground at Turnbury, and the two pits that we'll be mining at St. Ann’s, the first of which is producing ore at the moment. What I want to highlight is these five pits are well drilled, well defined in production. What we've been doing over the last six months is drilling out these zones between the pits and to the southwest of the southern pit at Turnbury. We've been getting really good results. That's likely to lead to a resource update and an expansion to that open pit, that initial open pit mine plan. Very positive outcome there. We knew the ore extended down there, but what we found from this drilling is the grade is better than we expected. A positive outcome there.
Our focus has been on drilling the pits, improving the classification, getting that into the mine plan. Beyond that, what we want to do, and now we've got cash flow coming in from gold sales, we want to go and deploy some of that capital into this three kilometers of strike between the southern end of Turnbury and the northern end of St. Ann’s to understand what's in that zone there. It's had a modest amount of drilling, very little drilling, to be honest. The drilling that we have done in that corridor has hit gold. Our focus has been on the near mine drilling. We'll now transition over the coming 12 months to test that bigger opportunity. This is that same open pit mining area. This is a drone image looking from the north to the south.
What I want to highlight here is just the progress that the teams have made since February when we started mining. These oval shapes, wide oval shapes, are the pit crests, the planned pit crests for the stage one pits. We started mining at St. Ann’s in the background there, and then progressively opened up Turnbury Central and Turnbury South. We've had really good steady ramp-up of that open pit mining. Over the coming months, at the moment, we've got ore coming out of St. Ann’s, the northern pit at St. Ann’s. Next month, we'll have ore coming out of Turnbury Central, and then later this quarter out of Turnbury South. We'll have, with more of those pits getting into ore, that gives us additional flexibility around grade streaming into the processing plant.
Importantly, these pits also, Turnbury Central and Turnbury South, provide the access positions or the takeoff positions for underground development. I mentioned that below these pits, we plan to have our second underground mine. These pits will be finished, or these stage one pits will be finished early next year, around April next year. At that point, mid-next year, we start underground development. We're in a position where we've got production flexibility. We've got open pit ore coming out of this open pit mining area. We've got our first underground mine started at Andy Well. Next year, we'll start our second underground mine at Turnbury. In terms of how the mines are performing, it's early days. You can't judge a mine over the period of a month. You need to look at a longer window. In terms of the trend, to date, it's been really positive.
We're getting positive reconciliation on both tons and grade. Importantly, this is the first open pit we started. We're now down into the meat of the ore body, if you like. Positive tons and grade reconciliation, which is a positive trend early on. It's relatively productive mining. These are broad zones of gold mineralization. It's not narrow vein as such, and the grade is improving with depth. This month, we'll be getting three gram material out of this mine. Next month, it increases to slightly over 4 g , and as we get deeper, that grade is quite consistent at that higher 4 g grade. Very strong grades coming out of this pit. In terms of the second pit to come to get into ore, this is the Turnbury Central pit. What I want to highlight here is the width of these ore zones.
Very broad zones of gold mineralization, where that leads to productive mining, highly efficient mining. We've just taken the top off this pit. We've got another 5 m bench of waste to get through before we get into ore. We'll be mining ore out of this pit next month. This pit, as I said, two things to highlight. The drilling we've done to the south of this pit has hit grades that were better than we had expected, better than what's in the resource model. That pit's likely to extend to the south, but it also provides, in the northern end of that pit, the position for the underground development to start. Highlighting that pit expansion, the drilling for the last 6 months- 12 months has been in that shallow zone between the pits. Really good grade results coming out of this area.
In here, that central pit is going to extend about 200 m to the south, and the southern pit is going to extend about another 150 m to the north. Those pits will come together. We're not talking about a deeper pit. We've just found better ore at shallow depth, and those pits will expand. Importantly, that can happen. Those pit extensions can happen while that underground development is occurring. We can finish off these initial starter pits, start the underground development, and while that's happening, we'll have these southern extensions to the oxide pits. This is all leading to, as I was talking to earlier, the opportunity for a mill expansion. We've now got a larger open pit mining opportunity. We're pulling forward development of our underground at Andy Well. We're pulling forward development of our underground mines at Turnbury.
We're going to have more ore available than this processing plant can currently process. There is a strong business case for that expansion to be executed upon. In terms of the underground mine, this first underground mine, we're operating under an owner-operator scenario. We own all of the equipment. We've spent the last two months onboarding our team, recruiting and bringing those guys on board, training them up, inducting them, and we're now developing underground. We'll be in ore next month. We'll have ore coming out from the underground next month. That's about 12 months ahead of the Definitive Feasibility study (DFS) schedule that we put out late last year. Importantly, the focus for the team this year is not to ramp up production. It's to establish the mine.
We all know how incredibly difficult it is to develop, set up, establish an underground mine to allow it to operate and run efficiently. What we want to do this year, while the mill has the high-grade open pit material going into it and filling it, is use that time to establish the mine so that when we need the ore, we need to ramp up production out of this underground next year, the mine's set up, and we can do that efficiently and effectively. While there will be about 100,000 tons of development ore coming up from the underground this year, the focus is not a rapid ramp-up. It's to make sure we establish and set the mine up so that we can mine efficiently next year when we need to ramp up production. Now, in terms of the opportunity, this is an incredibly high-grade ore body.
The resource grade is 8.6 g per ton. What you see on the slide there, these magenta shapes, that's not the entirety of the resource. What I've highlighted is purely the part of the resource that's plus 15 g per ton, so the very high-grade part of the resource. What you see there is this steep northerly trend. There are areas where there's just insufficient drilling. The deepest drilling we've got indicates that the ore body continues at depth, but then you've got windows where there's just no drilling. We expect that with further drilling, that high-grade mineralization extends both up dip and down dip. The other thing that I'll point to is if you look at the drill hits that are highlighted on the slide there, all of those drill hits are from virgin parts of the ore body.
They're all available for us to go and mine, and we will go and mine those. All incredibly high grade, double digits in most cases, some triple digit grades in there. Incredibly high-grade ore body. We'll be setting this mine up this year, full production next year. With that, we'll be drilling. First, the drill rig's going to get on site. Underground drill rig will be on site later this quarter. We'll be doing that drilling, working our way sequentially through these targets starting later this quarter. We expect that to replenish and uplift the existing resource as we continue to mine through it. Finally, in terms of the board and the management team, we're led by an extremely experienced board, a board that's got a track record, a demonstrable track record of creating value in the resources space.
A management team that's outlined the plan and then executed to the plan over the last 12 months. An incredibly proud time for those guys, given what they've done and achieved over the last 12 months. The final point that I'll make is the team in its entirety is invested in this company. We're all shareholders. We've put $4 million into the business to date collectively. We're very well aligned with the rest of the shareholder group. What we want is to grow the value, create more value, grow the value of the business, grow the size of the business. That's what we intend to do over the coming 12 months. Thank you all and happy to take more questions at the booth.