Next up, we have the Queensland companies for the last bit of our session. Starting with the Queenslanders, we have Metro Mining. Metro is Brisbane-based, Bauxite explorer producer, low-cost, high-grade Australian Bauxite, 100% owned Bauxite Hills Mine operation near Weipa in Queensland. Here to tell us the good news about Bauxite and Metro Mining, Managing Director Simon Wensley. Thanks, Simon.
Thank you very much, and thanks for having us back at Noosa again, four years in a row. I think the story has really gone from strength to strength every time we've been back. I'll give you an update of where we're at with Metro Mining and the Bauxite Hills Mine, but also maybe about what we're doing next. Just a reminder, Bauxite makes aluminum. Aluminum makes Aluminium. If you want to see what they look like, come to our booth. We've got a bit of a sample of all of those things. About six tons of Bauxite makes one ton of Aluminium. Of course, Aluminium is, you know, in everything that you look at, the buildings that you live in, the cars that you drive, the electrons that power your lights have been enabled by Aluminium and indeed every beer that you drink. Where's the growth?
It's in that electric vehicle, battery, power generation, grid connection side of the business. Aluminium is growing at about three to 4% per year. The large proportion of that is coming from that space. Not Intel inside, but Bauxite inside all of those things. Metro Mining, we are a simple, low-shaped, high-grade Bauxite producer just north of Weipa, about 100 kilometers north of Weipa. It's a well-known style of Bauxite. Weipa Bauxite's been produced from that location for more than 60 years on a Cape York plateau. It's high aluminum, doesn't require upgrading from our site. We produce a DSO product, very simple, flow sheet surface mining using very basic equipment, a simple and resilient screening circuit, and low-cost, scalable transshipping model. We have skipped the need for an expensive long jetty or a big port, and we do that via a very cheap and scalable transshipping model.
We have about 11 years of reserves in our current mine site and another 50 million tons of resources sitting around our current footprint. We are going to talk a bit about exploration on some other tenements a bit later. Physicals drive low cost and low cost drives margin in bulk commodities. We have a low-cost operating model. The physicals are very positive, very low strip ratio, very short haul. All of our pits are within, or our average haul distance is less than 10 kilometers through the life of the mine. I'll be demonstrating to you where we're at and heading down the cost curve to be the lowest cost producer in Bauxite in the world. Strategy-wise, four years ago, we were doing a two million ton run rate.
Over the last four years, we've put a new team in place, simplified the operation, recapitalized the business, made a change in our market positioning, and increased the resilience of our business to weather and external issues. We have now taken that flow sheet to deliver this year a guidance of 6.5 to seven million tons of high-grade Bauxite. Just some recent highlights. Basically, this is all about scale, driving margin in a market that has very good industry dynamics and improving industry dynamics. Last year, we successfully commissioned and expanded our expansion to seven million tons of capacity, ramped up through the year to deliver 5.7 million tons of production. Margins by the end of the year had reached $18 per ton, and we repaid just under $40 million of debt. In the quarter just gone, we have produced 1.7, 1.9 million tons for the year so far.
Our March quarter is affected by the North Queensland monsoon season. Record Q2 production. We're on track for that 6.5 to 7 million tons. Our site EBITDA for the last quarter was $54 million, which is underpinned by a margin of $32 per ton. You can see that journey from 2021 through to the last quarter of effectively going from a cash-negative operation through that economies of scale and effectively driving an expansion to catch the wave in the Bauxite market. What's happening in the marketplace? We're seeing continuing record traded Bauxite. China imports again, as an example, were another record in the first half of this year. We had a bit of a spike at the end of last year in pricing.
You can see a steady run-up in those prices on the right-hand side over the last four years or so, and there was a bit of a spike. Prices have softened a bit since then, but they're still sitting at a relatively high level compared to the last four years and sitting pretty much on the trend. I'll talk a bit more about this, but one of the big issues in this market or big drivers of this market is what's happening in Guinea. There are two big suppliers in this market, Guinea and Australia. We'll talk a bit about what's going on there. For our volume, we've got it backed. We've got all of our volume under contract. About 80% of that is now negotiated quarterly. We can catch changes in Bauxite price pretty quickly. What's happening in Guinea? They do provide about 75% of the volume into Asia-Pacific.
Guinea is run by an unelected military government, and they're heading for elections. Things are getting pretty unstable over there. They've just canceled five operating leases, which accounts for about 27% of the operating capacity out of Guinea, and they've canceled many more exploration licenses. They're also demanding a share of that production into their own trading company and that exporters use Guinea-registered vessels, of which there are none at the moment. Guinea has just entered its monsoon season. There's another 12% of that capacity, which is either curtailed or stopped because of weather, and that's going to continue for the next five months. Exports out of Guinea are currently plummeting, according to the most credible observer of the Bauxite market. This is probably going to take about one to two months to be felt in the market.
Overall, though, this is going to continue to push Bauxite export costs and delivered costs up in Guinea, and that's been happening already. Here's the cost curve. The far right-hand side of this cost curve is dominated by the Guinea production. That has already gone up at least $20 over the last four years. CM Group is predicting that that'll be around $65 per ton for the 90th percentile next year. At the same time, our target, and we're on track to deliver a $30 per ton delivered into the China market, and that'll take us to being the lowest cost producer in this market. That is the margin potential here as those right-hand side costs basically dictate where the equilibrium prices will be.
Metro will effectively be agnostic to that price and be able to generate, and our target here is to generate $20 per ton margin, as a minimum on a year-in, year-out basis. Where are we heading for 2026? We already, as I said, have a seven million ton capacity. We're going to try and push that up a little bit higher. We started exploration to increase mine life. We're going to try and turn that Q1, sort of wet season around to being a cash-positive outcome, which has been part of our strategy all along. We should be zero net debt by the end of this current quarter. That'll leave us in a good space to do some capital management at the end of the year.
If you go to the AGM presentation, we set out a framework of how we might manage that capital going forward, including a potential dividend. Exploration, you can see our current leases there on the north, the top part of that picture, in the orange with the black lines. Just north of that, we've got two leases just north of the Skardon River. We'll be going in there this year. We've also got a lease down near, just south of the Rio Tinto deposit at Amrun and west of Aurukun. We've just doubled the size of that exploration land, having agreed commercial terms with Profit Resources. We'll be going in there to do some exploration to add to those resources that we've currently got around the Skardon River. This is a very important aspect in Cape York.
The company's touched on this, but this really underpins the social license to operate we have up in Cape York. We've got a greater than 30% Indigenous employment rate. About 480 of our 520 workers all come from Far North Queensland. We're putting a lot of money back into that, $23 million just from Metro Mining alone, not including our contractors, into that economy. It's a multigenerational workforce. We work very hard to go into these communities to pick people up and take them back, and that's part of what we have to do there. There's a lot of increase in the spend and the sponsorship that we do in these local communities. It's a really important part of our culture and our business.
You can look at this later, a bit of detail, but a very highly qualified board, a lot of big company experience here, multi-commodity companies like Rio Tinto, South32, Queensland government representation, and a very stable management team. I'm very pleased to report we've pretty much been all together for going on three years here, with people, again, ex-Glencore, EY, Traxys, Anglo, Louis Dreyfus. A very capable team to continue to deliver on this project. Happily, had you invested last year, you would have seen about a 45% growth on your investment in Metro Mining from a share price perspective. We were at $0.02 at the beginning of last year, currently trading just below $0.07. That's a market cap of about $420 million.
We should, if we continue to develop, I mean, we at that $54 million EBITDA, if you, I guess, do the sums over that, at least on three quarters, if not four, then we're looking at a particular, an undervalued company here. Our target is certainly to continue to deliver that level of EBITDA and cash flow in our business. For us, EBITDA is pretty close to cash as our capital for our transshipping, for our tug and barge fleet, and our heavy mobile equipment and trucks is all contained in the OpEx due to the contractor arrangements that we have. Zero warrants outstanding, with a secured debt of $56 million, cash position of $28 million. We are fully hedged out this year at $0.63. From my perspective, look at Metro. We've driven significant volume growth. We've got more margin to deliver.
We've caught the first wave of the price spike. That's likely to be, given that issue I mentioned in Guinea, that's likely to be a continuing theme we're going to see. There's going to be a base, you know, a base of price that's going to sit around that $65, U.S. dollars per ton as that 90th percentile. We're going to continue to see these spikes in price. That happens when you have a significant supplier into a market that has an unpredictable situation like we have in Guinea. Very strong cash flow already with the potential to drive that forward next year towards eight million tons and that increasingly lower cost position.
Thank you very much for your time. We're in the booth outside near the exit.
If you'd like to come and have a chat or get a sample of one of those bits of our value chain, please come and see us. Thank you very much.