Thanks, Peter. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the webinar for Metro Mining. I thought it was a good idea to put one of these in place. I think there's been quite a lot of activity in the last month or so, with a fair few announcements coming out, and in the last few days, even a bit of a flurry around the shareholder base and so on. And so we can touch on that as well and also, importantly, I think update the market as we've been doing on, you know, the ramp up for this year, in terms of our, you know, this being our commissioning and ramp up year for the 7 million ton expansion to give everybody a bit of an update.
Look, I've got a pack which I can share. Let me just try and share that now. This pack went up onto the ASX this morning, and it's largely containing almost all information that's out there already. There's nothing market sensitive or new here that hasn't been put out before. Can everybody see that?
Yeah, it's, it's all quite clear, Simon.
All good. Okay. I'll give a bit of a summary. So you can see there, look, it's been a great, a great year for those of you who've been with us for a while. We certainly, you know, at the end of 2024, 2023, as we went through to 2024, we were, you know, trading in that sort of 1.5-2 cent, you know, range. And now, you know, through the rest of the year, up to that 6 cent, 6 cent level. Look, it's been a tremendous support. And I wanna thank everybody out there, you know, those who've been with us for a while and those who are fairly new on the register, as well. Look, it's been a very, very solid run this year.
Look, I think, you know, we really are on the precipice of what will be a really a truly superb year next year. I think really this is still just the entree, and we haven't yet got to the main course. I think that really is still to come in 2025, both from an operations perspective, from a market perspective, and therefore from a margin generation perspective. I did wanna just touch on the sort of recent changes in the shareholder base. Last week, one of our longest and largest shareholders, Greenstone Resources, private equity group out of the U.K. They've been with Metro as a cornerstone investor since the development of the company, back in 2018 and been around that long.
So they were coming towards the end of their fund life and took the opportunity to exit. You know, that's given an opportunity to another strategic investor. So this morning we announced that Virtue Investments Corporation has taken a 9.9% stake in Metro. So Virtue Investments Corporation is a fund out of Singapore. They are also already involved in a number of mining projects and indeed Australian mining projects. They are both a debt provider and lender. They're a significant equity holder in Stanmore Coal alongside some other Indonesian entities there. And so look, they've got a strong experience in the mining sector and indeed we believe will be a very positive long-term holder within Metro.
Also, you know, this morning, Nebari also, so yesterday morning sort of sold down another tranche of their equity. As we've said before, the equity that Nebari hold is by virtue of their warrants that they had picked up as part of the deal that we did on the long-term debt. Nebari are not long-term holders of equity. That's not their raison d'être. That's not their business model. So, they have exercised those warrants over a period of time and taken an equity position, but their mode is to not hold that for the long term. So, you know, Nebari are still extremely strong supporters of the company. We announced last week a restructure of our debt.
We've been running a competitive process to look at refinancing the debt that we put in place at the beginning of 2023 to underpin our expansion, and you know, that happened, and Nebari ended up, you know, restructuring all of the debt that was in there at a lower coupon rate, and adding another tranche and some flexibility into our debt package, so very strong supporters of the company, indeed, and I might ask, you know, Nathan to touch on that towards the end of the session. Okay, so look, this is just our standard sort of summary for those people who are a little bit new to the company.
So we run this fairly simple mining operation up in the northern part of Cape York Peninsula on the west coast there, about a hundred kilometers north of Weipa. You know, we have a very good quality Weipa style ore site deposit, very low overburden strip ratio and very close to the coast. We've got a long life, 12 years of reserves, plus an additional roughly sort of 30 million tons of resources there and a very simple flow sheet. So we mine using fairly standard equipment. We've got a new very resilient screening circuit, which takes out the oversize, which we then crush back into the system and a low cost and scalable transshipping model. So all of that means that we have all of the prerequisites of a very competitive and low cost bulk commodity operation.
That's exactly where you want to be, low cost. We are heading right down to the bottom of the cost curve, the economies of scale. As we lock in this seven million ton capacity, we'll take us to probably one of the lowest cost producers in this market. Look, just a quick review there. How have we been? We are traveling. This chart appeared in the operational update earlier in the week. You can see that we've had another very, very solid month up in the zone that we've been targeting, the seven million ton zone. We've had a bit more variability in the last month due to a couple of operational issues and also some planned maintenance there.
But you can also see that we've sort of hit. We've also hit higher rates than we've had in any of the previous months. Indeed, we've sort of hit a daily record there from a barge loading and transshipping point of view of almost 36,000 tons per day. So that gives you a sense of what the capability of the system is. We've maintained rates between 20,000 and that number for quite long periods during the month. So again, that gives me a good sense that the expansion is pretty much locked in now. So it's all about optimization from here. I've just listed a couple of, you know, items there in terms of what we've been doing. And so mining was certainly a standout for November.
We saw the benefit of all of our quad trailer consists all operating on the site there. And we were able to build up, you know, we always like to have a bit of stock on the ground going into December. So there's a fair bit of work now going on around optimization, looking at how we, you know, as we hit these very high rates. And when you're doing 35,000 tons in a day and only, you know, sort of, 12 months ago, we were probably doing half that. It does challenge some of those interfaces between the equipment that's been there for a while and the new pieces of equipment.
We're really looking at those interfaces and also in terms of how we plan around some of the more unpredictable things like tides and weather, et cetera. These are all still factors that we're facing. As we head now towards January, you know, February, we are gonna go into a strong maintenance program in January and February. That's already underway in terms of planning. It's a quotation procurement. That's all very much a long way down the track there. We're certainly planning on some significant maintenance over this period. That restructuring of the debt has really given us a very strong underpinning for that maintenance program. We now feel very comfortable going into that period with all the cash that we need to be able to do that.
Indeed, Ikamba, while it's performed well in its first year, there are some things that we have to modify as we go into next year. We're looking at the chutes, the transfer chutes between the conveyors, and the boom loader. The boom loader, we want to upgrade that to a further state of productivity for next year. We've still got a lot of bottlenecking, sorry, de-bottlenecking activities underway to try to increase our capacity further from this sort of 7 million tons. We'll keep the market updated as to how those are progressing in the future. Look, I did wanna touch a bit on the market. I put together our usual slide there, which sort of shows the Guinea price and the Australian price on the same chart.
Look, it's fair to say that we've seen quite the intersection of a number of factors here that have set this price, you know, through the roof. I mean, there's no other way of saying this. In the last, I think our consultant in this sort of reached escape velocity. I think that's sort of more of a planetary simile. But it, you know, the prices here are now at record levels. And indeed, I think seeing the Guinea price at over 105, you know, we are, you know, I think we are now more expensive or that's more expensive than iron ore. But look, I think I've been flagging this for a while now.
I was involved in the iron ore industry back in the early two thousands. This is exactly what happened. I mean, we saw demand grow, we saw supply constraints occurring in China. We found, you know, people found it difficult to bring on, you know, larger, higher grade mines sufficient to meet demands. I know the scale here in aluminum is not quite to the same square scale as the iron ore market, but we're talking about exactly the same dynamics here. Structural change is occurring in the industry structure here. Quite often, as we see in this, in our industry, rents tend to migrate towards the upstream into the raw materials. So that is exactly what you're seeing here in this bauxite market.
I don't quite know where this is going. I did sort of, I think last webinar sort of talk about a $100 Capesize. Look, we're now there. But you know, obviously this is a very strong market. There will be a supply response, I'm sure, but demand is still growing. It's, you know, I don't see a rapid, you know, a rapid reduction. I think we are seeing some structural change in this market. The alumina price, you know, you can see on the right-hand-side chart there. The Chinese market is obviously the clearing market for alumina. You can see local and imported prices also, you know, at massively high. We're about over $750 a ton there in local currency terms.
I think, you know, this is obviously there is trying to have that last ton of bauxite to make that additional ton of alumina, which is what's driving these prices much higher. Look, you know, the Australian price is at $88. You know, this quarter, you know, we'll obviously see contract prices that are much more reflective of the market as it was back in, you know, the third quarter of this year. That, that's what affected the contract pricing. Now we will see, you know, the impact of these higher prices will flow through for us in the second quarter of next year. That is where, you know, we'll start to see the impact of that.
Look, just a couple of pictures to give you a sense how things are going on site here. You know, the 992 loaders there are now fully operational. They're choke feeding, you know, choke feeding the wobbler circuit. We're seeing, you know, planned rates now from that at over 1,600 ton per hour. And you can see then the plan of the whole site there. So you can see the wobbler, sitting up on the middle of the circuit there, the middle of the circuit and the former screen, as we're calling it, screen one is still able to feed into the overland conveyor. So, that's now the circuit that will operate from here on. And we're getting into most of the bulk of our product in the middle there.
You can see our new control center. So, we can now operate all of the equipment from a central control point. And that control point sort of goes all, can see and operate all the way down to the barge loader. Yeah, look, and just, it's probably one of my favorite pictures here on the left, you know, the Capesize being loaded by the two transshippers. We stabilized now operating practice and crew on the Ikamba. And so that's coming through in more stable operations. We did have a few issues with the belt, which we have dealt with and are dealing with in an ongoing way until the wet season. But, we're still hitting, you know, record tons.
So the whole system is delivering the potential to deliver, you know, over 35,000 tons per day, which is great to see. We just need to make it more consistent. So consistency is the key going forward. And look, pleasingly, we've also loaded a number now of the Newcastle variant of the Capesize vessel. So we are expecting that we'll see probably about half of our vessels next year or over half will be in the Newcastle size. And that lowers costs for us. It increases productivity because we don't have to move the vessel so often. And we can sort of get more out of each, you know, out of each cycle of each OGV. Okay. Well, look, that was a brief summary.
I know there's always a lot of questions out here, but I might just ask Nathan to give us a couple of minutes just on the finance, on the restructuring of the debt.
Yes, thanks. Like Simon mentioned, I think it was just last week we released to the market the updated terms of what was ultimately a very competitive and productive refinancing process. So it was a refinancing process that took place over really a period of sort of six to nine months. Really the key for us in this process was to make sure that we had timed it well to be able to ultimately go to the market and get the repricing that we thought was appropriate for the business.
And so with the expansion now bedded in, we were able to demonstrate essentially the runs on the board, and that what we have here is a significantly de-risked operation. And we got essentially the repriced debt that is commensurate with that risk. So it was really pleasing to be able to get that done. And it was really pleasing in terms of the interest and engagement that we got from the market on that as well. So like I said, it was a very competitive process. And to Nebari's credit, they put forward a very compelling term sheet and very compelling restructure that not only delivered essentially a better coupon rate, which was obviously one of the impetuses for going out for this restructure, but also provided us with increased flexibility, which was something else that we were looking for.
So very pleasing to get that done. Continues to be a very productive relationship and also pleasing to get it done before the end of the year as well as we start to move into what's gonna be a very, very busy wet season. As tempting as it is to get to the end of what has been a very big year and have a breather. But on the contrary, it's gonna be a very, very busy wet season and an exciting wet season as we start to look forward to making all the improvements and all the debugging that we've seen in the new gear, and get ready for a very big year in 2025.
Yeah, that's right. I think 25 boats well. We're still bedding down the budgeting process for next year.
But it all looks really excellent from both a volume and a margin point of view. We'll be trying to make the most out of this. Obviously the market is strong. You know, we'll be basing it around everything that we've got there already, but we're already working on ways that we might sort of try and stretch that over the year. So we haven't quite got that locked in yet, but we are very close to being able to do that. But look, you know, the Q4 quarterly will show, I think, increased, you know. We showed about a $14-a-ton margin for last quarter. Sorry.
You know, we'll be increasing that with increased prices and the economies of scale coming through our costs a little bit more as well. So, we're looking to try and, you know, even though we're still pushing for as high a volume as we can for next year, we'll still be looking to try and take our cost down in real terms for next year. So, you know, that's still gonna be on the cards as we try to optimize everything. Okay, Peter, we normally have a few questions. So is any out there?
We do, Simon. It's obviously in this pricing environment, there's a lot of interest in the pricing both that you have today and what's coming up.
One of the questions is, when do your fixed contracts finish or, and when will you be exposed to the current spot price or what we see in that spot price environment?
Yeah. I guess we, you know, we purposely have not run a spot-based business over the last three years. I mean, that's been required really for us to get the lending, the support from lenders and I suppose, you know, that kind of risk mitigation has been absolutely necessary in our business to take some of the volatility out of our results. Look, you know, that means obviously that we don't have exposure to the spot price.
I mean, this year we had probably three or four cargoes that were sold under sort of more like spot conditions. Next year we've got about just over a million tons that are still on a legacy, the expansion, what we call in the expansion contract. So the contracts we signed in the middle of 2022. So there's about a million tons of that next year still on those legacy that legacy pricing from 2022. I mean, the rest of it will be on quarterly reset. So up to we've announced 6.9 million tons of locked in sales for next year. You know, the bulk of that will now be on quarterly repricing. The quarterly repricing does bear a strong resemblance to, I guess, the spot market.
The spot market is one of the factors we use in a negotiation with our customers, but there are other factors as well. Obviously, you know, a contract customer who's taking, you know, might be taking 10 cargoes a year, you know, they don't expect to, you know, sort of be exposed to a single cargo price. So look, we're trying to factor in as much as we can. There are also other factors, the freight market and so on. You know, what's happening with the caustic soda price because that affects the value in use of our product. So all of these things sort of go into every negotiation. You know, I'll be getting out there in February to try and negotiate prices for the Q2.
If the prices stay as they are at the moment, you know, I'd be expecting that we could get a, you know, a fairly substantial portion of that, of those prices into contracts for next year. I mean, that has to be the way that it happens. But it won't be everything and it might take, you know, a few more months to a few more quarters to get everything in. It has been an enormous increase this, you know, this last quarter. So it may take a few more to get to bed them in. But, you know, it'll certainly be an increasing price environment through next year.
We're looking to try, you know, if we can get more volume out over and above the contracts next year, we'll be looking to try and take advantage of that spot, that spot price. So there's very, very strong incentive for us to try and get more, a bit more volume out. Given the spike in the bauxite price, does the discount that Metro receives versus Amrun benchmark price change, or does the discount remain consistent on a per ton basis? It remains relatively consistent on a contract by contract, sort of on a contract to contract basis. So if you know, if Amrun is contracting at a certain level, then, you know, our value in use is based around the cost of treating of the silica and alumina. So that stays broadly the same in U.S. dollar terms.
So it's not a % per se. That discount based on quality is usually based around the cost of caustic soda or, you know, the sort of the bauxite to alumina ratio in the refinery. So look, I think it broadly stays the same from a value in use perspective.
Thanks, Simon. Taking advantage of these high prices with a little bit of extra production would be nice. What's the opportunity there and perhaps the plan to expand the resource and, you know, perhaps other commodities within that mineralization as well, perhaps the kaolin, if that's available.
Okay. A lot of questions there. Okay.
So look, expansion, you know, the two biggest parts of our expansion are really making the most of our barge loading. So being able to load barges quickly and then getting them out to the transshippers. The transshipper, you know, Ikamba has already demonstrated the ability, you know, we knew it had it there. It's already demonstrated significant upside to what it's already being required to do. So really the key is around that barge loading and the ability to get a material out to feed the transshipping. So look, I think where we're looking at the moment is increased capacity through the barge loader. So the barge loader, this wet season is gonna go offsite. It's gonna get completely stripped down.
We're gonna replace the extendable part of the conveyor with a completely new boom on the end. And all of the other parts are gonna get sandblasted, you know, recoated, repainted. All the motors are gonna get changed out. All the belts obviously are gonna get changed. So we're gonna see some upside from the barge loader next year. But you know, further down the track, it's around, you know, how can we further increase the size of that? So we're going through study work there. Also, the number of tugs and barges, the size of those barges, that's also part of our study, you know, the study that we're going through as well. So, you know, we've already done a bit of simulation work, some design work on what that might look like.
Getting, for example, more tons on barges, that's exactly, you know, part of how we would get more tons per day out. Look, all of those things are a part of that equation. The mining site's relatively easily scalable with, you know, more loaders and more trucks and trailers. Look, I think, you know, in terms of other products, you know, there is obviously a Kaolin resource on the site. We've done some feasibility work on that this year that's continuing. We visited markets and customers. I mean, with the bauxite price where it is at the moment, it probably still makes sense for us to be selling bauxite over anything else than, and rather than create risk in our production chain.
But we are certainly preparing ourselves for when there might be a time when the Kaolin resource is capable of being extracted and being sold. So, you know, that work is on a slow burn there. We've developed that opportunity. We've got, you know, we've done some test work on it. It's gone to customers to be tested. So look, it's there, but look, right now the focus is really on bauxite and making the most out of that. I mean, at these prices, you know, with our margin that we can generate from the bauxite, that really is the prime focus for 2025. Exploration. Did you talk about exploration? Yeah. So that, sorry, that's. I jumped over that. So look, we have done some exploration this quarter for the first time.
They've mainly been on EPM and MDL leases that are surrounding our current pits. So, you know, but we have stepped outside our current reserve areas to explore, you know, sort of what you might call additional sort of step out or bolt on opportunities outside of our current reserve base. So that's been in the Southern Garden River area. Next year we will continue to do that, but we're also gonna step across the river. We do have a large EPM on the northern side of the river, which does contain bauxite sites. So, you know, we're going to start building up there to understand what that might be there, as well.
We're also looking. We've got a couple of other EPMs further south, and we're also reviewing plans to get into maybe one or both of those next year as well. That'll depend on I guess time and resources.
Thanks, Simon. Just a question on Nebari. How many shares do they continue to own? And is there an exit strategy for that?
As of today, they don't own any actual shares. So they still hold 116 million. Sorry, they're still. There are still 116 million warrants outstanding, of which Nebari's portion, Nathan is.
About 102 million is Nebari.
So 102 million of those are with Nebari and the remainder is with are with the junior lenders.
So no share. All of their current equity has been sold down, but the warrants, which would convert into equity, are still there.
And on that particular topic, can you discuss the company's strategy or plans to repay remaining junior debt?
Yep. So all the junior debt will be repaid this month. So we will end the year with all of those liabilities repaid.
And the last couple of questions are around the weather, Simon. Given the weather patterns in your guidance, how do you see the time that you've allocated for the weather to impact positively or negatively on your guidance?
Look, it's a really hard one. If you go back, even, you know, in the short history of Metro, we've had Decembers with zero lost days to weather in December, and we've had days where we've lost, you know, probably 11 or 12, you know, 12 days if you add it all up, so you know, there's a strong extreme to those weather outcomes, you know, the expansion. We could have gone for a cheaper expansion here, but we've spent a fair bit of time and money looking at our flow sheet and saying, well, how can we make it more resilient to weather, so that is gonna be tested a little bit, obviously, as we get towards the end of this year. You know, I'm not gonna make a prediction. I mean, we plan for a number of days.
I think it's sort of, you know, five or six days of lost days. We've already seen, you know, this week a few, what we call, you know, TARPs. They're basically, we shut the site down for lightning. And when we get very heavy rain, because it just becomes unsafe to operate, you know, so those hours that we lose all get added up. So look, we've already lost, you know, in this sort of last four or five days, you know, roughly, you know, two, I don't know, three or four hours per day from storm rainstorms and lightning.
But that doesn't, you know. We've built a lot of mining that tends to affect our mining and our screening process and barge loading. I mean, it doesn't affect the transshipping as much until we start to get significant swell. And that hasn't shown itself yet. So look, we're ready. It happens every year. We know it's coming. We're prepared for it. We're better prepared for it this year than we have ever been. So, you know, it's actually gonna be a nice trial for us to see how well our new equipment behaves versus the equipment that we've had in the past. So look, it's a bit difficult to say. I think, look, we're certainly. We have a shipping schedule that was gonna deliver the 6 million tons.
We obviously try and flex that as we sort of get through the month. We may sort of run over the end of the month a little bit to try and deliver, but we're certainly getting, and then we're certainly going all out to try and hit that 6 million tons.
Thank you, Simon. And Nathan, that brings to the end our questions. If there are a few, or anybody else has more questions I wanna send through, please make sure you get them and I'll send them through to Simon for him to answer you individually. Otherwise, thank you everybody for joining us. And thank you, Simon and Nathan, for giving us this, I think, a pretty successful update for the period.
Great. Thank you.
All right. Thanks everyone.